LinuxMint Cinnamon, cont.
In reply to @brent's comment:
If you, or anyone else who uses Cinnamon could tell me how to solve that problem (i..e., no app icons in the Workplace Switcher), I'd love to know how to fix that. To illustrate what I mean, this is how they look in the bottom pannel on my Plasma laptop.
And this is the best I've been able to do with Cinnamon in this VM.
There are 10 workspaces on my laptop, but I only create 8 for any of the VMs I build, because the third from the right on the laptop is where VirtualBox resides, and the one just to the left of that is the desktop on which I run VMs, so in the case above, that's where the LinuxMint VM appears now. Years ago, at work, I created a Hyper-V VM on a Windows workstation that could itself host a child VM, but that was strictly an experiment, and it had limited success. I won that bet, but I have no interest in doing it again, so my VMs only need 8 workspaces to otherwise match the functionality of their host.
On VMs with the MATE DE, the windows representing the workspaces are smaller, like this. And this image from my Solus MATE VM shows that few of the native apps actually provide such icons. The ones you see here are for Thunderbird, Vivaldi, Spider Solitaire, Mahjongg, and the MATE Terminal. (That terminal is the only one that's actually a native MATE app -- the others are apps I installed from the Solus repository.) I mention that because Cinnamon is sometimes compared with MATE, but I've found it to be much superior, in both appearance and performance. And, for what it's worth, this Cinnamon VM is also smaller than my Solus MATE VM.
CONCLUSION
Actually, i've changed my mind since yesterday about any further configuration of Thunderbird and Vivaldi, as this VM has served its purpose already. I don't plan to keep this VM around forever, unlike my Solus VMs, but I will keep it available for a short while, in case anyone does know how I can fix the problem with the virtual desktops that I illustrated here. If I ever examine another distro with a Cinnamon DE, I'd like to be able to get that part right.
Overall, I'm impressed with both Mint (as I figured I would be), and with the Cinnamon DE. Configuring it was as easy as configuring any of the DEs that Solus currently offers -- just different in various ways, so I needed to experiment a bit and learn as I went along. But that's true of any unfamiliar DE the first time I use it. When I think about it, it was actually no more difficult than figuring out how to do simple things with Solus GNOME, for example.
Installing this OS was straightforward, and didn't require a lot of guesswork. As I mentioned in the first post, I had opted in the VirtualBox manager to create this VM as an EFI version, and the installer took the hint and created an EFI partition on the virtual disk drive that I provided. The installer did not install a SWAP partition (and didn't ask me if I wanted one, as many installers do) so I wasn't able to try hibernating this OS. However, it did offer the option to install onto a virtual drive that I'd already partitioned before starting the installer, as Solus does. I'm confident that if I'd taken the time to partition the drive before installing the OS, it would have worked as expected.
All the software I needed or wanted was either present by default, or I was able to install it from the Ubuntu repository, with the exception of Vivaldi, but that was easy to fetch from the Vivaldi.com web site, and trivial to install with GDebi, which was the default handler for opening .DEB files. The native command-line package manager is apt, which is used by so many different distros that it's already familiar to many of us. The apt wrapper, Nala, was not present by default, but it was available from the repository. Apt works so much like eopkg, though (except without eopkg's shortcuts, like it, up, and so on), that most Solus users who have never used it before would have no problem adapting to it, even without the Nala wrapper. In addition, LinuxMint also provides its own Package Manager app and Synaptic Package Manager for those who prefer to work graphically.
LinuxMint Cinnamon loads and enables 76 unit files at startup, which makes it significantly slower both to startup and to shutdown that Solus (which loads 3 or 4, depending on the DE). To anyone who uses Solus regularly, the difference is enough to be noticeable, but it's actually pretty typical. Folks who don't use Solus regularly would probably never notice.
To summarize, I found Cinnamon, as implemented in LinuxMint, to be quite attractive, and except for the Workplace Switcher issue I mentioned earlier, very functional. I was impressed with its design, how easy it was to install, and how well everything just worked. Subjectively, it seemed about as energetic as my Solus VMs, and in spite of being a Ubuntu derivative, the VM I created was no bigger than those. (I couln't make any exact comparisons, because my Solus VMs each have several snapshots saved, which increases their size somewhat -- the LinuxMint VM does not. But my experience with VirtualBox leads me to believe that LinuxMint is probably about the size of Solus MATE.
Its menu doesn't have a Settings category that opens a separate dialog, but instead displays all of the setting types as categories on the menu itself, which I find unintuitive, but others might disagree. Most of the reviews in these threads mention something starting out like, "If anything should ever happen to Solus ... " Well, something did happen to Solus for several months, and although I used a couple of other distros at that time, I could have just as easily used LinuxMint Cinnamon as a replacement for the missing Solus.
If only I could have solved that app-icons-in-the-workspace-switcher problem I described here, I'd have no complaints at all about Cinnamon. If anyone reading this knows how I can fix that, please let me know, and I'll give it a try before I remove this VM. Finally, I usually end one of these adventures with a neofetch image, but I've already done that in the previous post, so it wouldn't look any different here.