Moat wrote:Hi rufwoof - let us know of what you think of the Mate desktop environment. I think it's an excellent all-around DE - very reasonably light and fast/responsive, yet plenty of straightforward tweakability + panel plugin assortment/menu choices.
Hi Bob
I'm not that familiar with VirtualBox and expanding the size was a bit of a pain. Had to clone the existing 6GB one first as I'd set that to fixed rather than dynamic and apparently cloning transposes it over to dynamic ... which needs to be the case before you can resize the .vdi Then once you've cloned and resized it you have to install gparted within the machine and resize the partition. I also had problems with the UUID's not matching. Got there in the end, and installed the Guest Additions (which also didn't come easy/naturally), but now its working great. In Seamless mode and with the machine settings to share the clipboard/cut-paste etc you can have both running alongside each other. Attached is my Debian File Manager dragging and dropping a file into Mint's file manager. By default I like my menu at the top of the screen so Mints being at the bottom pairs nicely with that. And fully installed into the VM (rather than just running the .iso/live-boot) its running at a reasonable/usable rate, even on my relatively old 4 core 2GB system.
The browser and other progs are working great. Which is nice as its more integrated i.e. isolated browser session from the rest of the system (personal docs etc.).
Clickable thumbnail.
Catches you out a bit, press print screen and depending on what's in focus either Mint's or Debian's screen capture window pops up
Or you can have both
I haven't installed guest additions yet on the Debian side, so currently it looks like drag and drop is just one way instead of the bi-directional value I set (similar for screen capture, Mint currently just captures its own windows, Debian captures both windows). Playing a sneekylinux youtube in Mint's Firefox and play another in Debian's didn't work well, the second to be started kept spinning (loading). Playing Kodi (listening to a radio station) in Debian, playing a youtube in Mint did work however, overlaid sound (hear both).
I guess the obvious choice is to use two desktops, one on each and just flip desktops to switch between the two (handy being able to drag/drop and cut/paste etc between them as well
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Load wise it runs quite well with just 2GB of ram. Slows some when heavily loaded (youtubes playing and kodi running), but for general use OK (I allocated 1GB of ram to the virtual machine, could have got away with less IMO to leave more available for the host)
UPDATE : on thinking more about two youtubes playing, that's potentially down to I'm running the Debian FF in a restricted user session, perhaps when a local firefox (user) then I suspect that might be fine.