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Q Cinnamon challenge
I was originally using the Cinnamon version of Linux Mint 21.3. I heard good things about MATE, so I did a new installation to try out MATE. After several months, I decided that I would like to go back to Cinnamon. I am not sure how to switch back without reinstalling Mint again – and because this Mint PC is my daily driver, I don’t want to do a new reinstall again as it’s very time-consuming to configure things how I want again.
A The only significant difference between the Cinnamon and MATE releases is the default set of desktop packages installed on top of the base Linux Mint software. If you want to switch to Cinnamon, you only need to install the mint-meta-cinnamon package. Meta packages like this are a way of installing multiple packages as a set; mint-metacinnamon is not much more than an empty package that depends on the various packages used by the Cinnamon edition. Once you have installed this, log out of the MATE desktop and on the login screen, you’ll see an option to select your preferred desktop, just to the right of your login name. This means you now have both Cinnamon and MATE available. The system remembers your last choice and makes it the default next time, which is particularly useful if you use auto-login. Having MATE there as well should make no difference to your computer apart from a slight consumption of disk space. Adding Cinnamon on top of MATE used around 200MB here; MATE is lighter so expect to save less than that by removing it. In the past, we have seen some duplicate menu entries when installing multiple desktops but that does not seem to be an issue now.
If you really want to get rid of MATE, you can uninstall the mint-meta-mate package. This in itself does not free up any space as it is only a meta package, but you should then be able to remove any packages that were only dependencies of this one with:
$ sudo apt autoremove
We recommend taking a backup before any autoremove operation, just in case it removes more than you wanted. As for having to reconfigure things after a reinstall, you may wish to consider using a separate partition for /home when you come to install the next version. Per-user configuration settings are saved in your home directory, so keeping this separate from the operating system means your settings, and other data, are not touched when you install a new OS.
Q Not so new
I currently have a home server running Openmediavault. I use TV Headend to record TV shows to a folder that is automatically scraped into Kodi by Jellyfin. I have an issue, however. W
