Linux Mint has four desktop environments that you can choose from. There is KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon and Mate. The two most common choices by users are Cinnamon and Mate. Technically, you can download any of the desktop environments and change them later. If you decide to go with Mate and later on want to install Cinnamon, the change is going to be easy.

You just need 400MB of extra disk space, which is practically nothing judging on the size of hard drives nowadays. The only other decision to make is to whether include multimedia effects or leave them out. My preference is to include them.

Let’s say you’ve decided to go with Mate and want to install Cinnamon later on. Changing from Mate to Cinnamon is quite easy. All you have to do is install Cinnamon via the Terminal which is my preference. You can easily do the same using a GUI package manager.

From Mate to Cinnamon

$ sudo apt-get install mint-meta-cinnamon

From Cinnamon to Mate

$ sudo apt-get install mint-meta-mate

Once you’ve made the change. You need to log out of the current desktop environment and log in again and making sure you select the environment you would like to use. You can switch back and forth desktop environments to your hearts delight. As you can see, changing desktop environments in Linux Mint is quite easy.