this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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Can i install Debian with no DE and mix programs from several DEs? (lemmy.world)
submitted 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) by IndigoGollum@lemmy.world to c/debian@lemmy.ml
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Of the desktop environments i've tried, i prefer Cinnamon overall. But i find that i'd rather use the KDE or Mate versions of some programs. I don't need Nemo when i'd rather use Thunar, or Gnome Characters when i prefer mate-character-map or kcharselect.

Is there any reason i can't start with nothing that's specific to any one DE, then install whatever i need to have Cinnamon applets with the Mate and KDE programs i want? I don't expect this to be easier than picking one DE and sticking with that, but is it so much harder that it's not worth the trouble to have my computer so customized? How common is it to use a custom blend like this?

This was sparked when, while cleaning up my system that still has similar programs from several DEs, i accidentally broke Cinnamon and had to reinstall it, complete with everything i'd removed in favor of some other DE's version of a program.

[hr]

What window managers are recommended for situations like this? I've always used whatever comes with my DE, without really being aware of the window manager. How does that affect what display manager i need?

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[โ€“] IndigoGollum@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

That has occurred to me. My current computer has enough storage (assuming i don't lose hundreds of GBs to system log files like i did back in Mint) and i already have dependencies from several DEs from when i was trying some out and didn't know how to fully uninstall the ones i don't want.

[โ€“] DaBPunkt@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago

The dependencies will be removed with the package you tried when you remove the package.