I've been running Linux Mint under XFCE for a while now and I am growing tired of it. I originally had cinnamon which I did not really like so I decided to go with XFCE and customize it to my liking.
However it's been almost a year with that setup and I want to switch it up. I have never used Gnome before but I have a feeling it is the perfect DE for me.
I've heard a few stories of people trying to switch from Cinnamon to Gnome which was pretty unstable. However, does anyone know how going from XFCE to Gnome would be?
Why do you ask? Install it as a second DE and give it a try. You can alvays switch back if you don't like it.
It's fine for the most part. Just keyboard shortcuts won't work in default and theming is slightly difficult. You have add extensions to gnome to increase functionality.
Truth be told, once I made myself live without extensions for a week, I realized I never needed them in the first place. Gnome has a way of making you discover a slightly different way of doing the same thing that in hindsight just works better with the overall system than an extension would.
But to each their own...
If you like xfce, I think that kde is more similar to it than gnome. So I would recommend giving kde a try too.
An easy way to test out both is to just use a live image booted from a USB. You could always install them to your everyday PC but then you have a lot more packages installed and I personally would rather keep my installed packages to a minimum. If you can't do a live cd because your os doesn't provide one then I would try a vm or a different drive that you can boot into.
It should work on Mint as well, but the theming may be off you will probably have to redo Icons and such. Just FYI, XFCE can totally look like Gnome (look at rhino Linux) if you theme it. You may consider installing the SaveDesktop app and redoing your XFCE setup (the unixporn community has some great inspiration)
