That old man yelling at clouds was impressed by a humble little GNU/Linux OS? And then one Orca likes as well???
Shocking! 😮
But it’s true, as far as Debian distros go in the mom n pop field of everyday users, Sparky Linux is just great. A super stable work horse, with less shit to worry about than with your old LMDE. For Karmi and me it’s the better alternative! It’s not often that Karmi and Orcs are pulling at the same string, so in order to celebrate the random occasion you should try it, too!
No, for realsies now: Get away from the increasingly disappointing Ubuntu base, fool! Once Clem and his boys have decided to sever all ties with Canonical/Ubuntu you may go back to Mint. But for now SparkyLinux or MX Linux is where the music plays.
PS: And it even comes with your fave yummy desktop taste. 😉
Thar She Blows! 
We can amaze each other at ‘Rare‘ times, huh! 😉
Also installed the Stable SparkyLinux 6.3 Cinnamon version on my converted Chromebook’s 32GB eMMC storage…to replace Chrome OS, and the Stable 6.3 works great also. However, 6.3 requires a swap partition, and I could not get Clonezilla to restore a saved image of it because of the swap file. Long story, but Clonezilla will restore a saved image of openSUSE 15.4 Leap wid a btrfs & swap partitions. 6.3 had ext4 & swap partitions. Maybe btrfs & swap partitions don’t overlap, but ext4 & swap do…?
I like to use Clonezilla to make restorable images of my favorites Linux OSes, which is why I ended up trying Sparky 7…worked out great!
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Amazed? I was fuxn FASCINATED!
All that technobabble tho, went straight above me noggin. 😮 Fortunately this humble Mate queen doesn’t need to revert to contortions in order to enjoy her Sparky right outta the box. ^.^
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Been awhile, but am pretty sure you can add the Cinnamon DE to the MATE installation after it is done. Which would be a easier method than my normal MinimalGUI edition route since MATE is one of the default fully supported editions, and you are it’s ‘Queen‘. 😉
Next time you do a Sparky review for your readers, since Cinnamon is a popular DE there, give the Synaptic Package Manager a shot after you’re done installing MATE.
Open Synaptic Package Manager, do a search, and type cinnamon into the “Find” popup. Search will show a bunch of cinnamon stuff…I believe it’s the one at the top, just cinnamon by itself. Click it ‘n a bunch of other stuff pops up in the “Mark additional required changes?” window. Mark ‘n accept it all ‘n Apply. Synaptic Package Manager is excellent for adding new ‘n different DE’s…
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I did install Sparky/Mate today, made some snapshots and am planning of doing the writeup tomorrow. Thx for the instructions on how to install Cin with Synaptic. Will try that as an additional task tomorrow as well.You know, after spending some years with Arch and the Terminal I forgot about the standard Linuxy ways of doing stuff. 😐
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