[conspire] greetings from latest debian mint " linux " supposed kde4

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> Obviously you don't like KDE4.  How much effort would it be to install
> an earlier version of KDE?  Or is Mint like Ubuntu, which makes it
> easy to install the "standard release" and difficult to do anything
> else?

This is just an off-the-cuff impression, so take cum grano salis, but 
the hitch is going to be package dependencies.  You could take an
installation of Linux Mint Debian Edition and remove KDE 4.6 packages, 
but then where are you going to get a set of Debianised KDE 3.x
software, even in Debian source code form, let alone compatible
binaries?  A fallback would be to attempt to find a non-Debian, but
nonetheless maintained and debugged, set of KDE 3.x source code and
attempt to create and compile a set of Debian packages from that, but
that sounds like a huge project.  One would have to hate 4.6 and love
3.x a _whole_ lot, and have a great deal of time and energy to spare.

No offence intended to Bruce, but I don't think his dislike of 4.6 is so
far inspiring much corrective action beyond complaining about it, and
searching around for something that still packages 3.x.

> Related question:  You referred to Debian-Mint.  Numerous web-sites
> refer to Ubuntu-Mint.  Guess I just opened the door to a lot of
> comments.

The original edition of Linux Mint was and remains standard Ubuntu plus
proprietary codecs, proprietary browser plugins, and other code with
sundry legal problems.  Recently (December 2010), that was supplemented
with the separate Linux Mint Debian Edition v. 10, which is Debian
'squeeze' (which at the time of LMDE v. 10 release was the 'testing'
branch for Debian).  LMDE bears the same relationship to Debian that
regular Linux Mint does to Ubuntu.

Regular Linux Mint is binary compatible with Ubuntu.  LMDE is binary
compatible with Debian.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mint