If I understand it correctly, layering an application is no more dangerous than a regular install on a non atomic os.

True~ish.

There's an important caveat though; for whatever reason, rpm-ostree can outright fail to upgrade (due to conflicts related to layered packages) while an issue like that is more rare on traditional Fedora and dnf. Thankfully, I've never had a problem that I couldn't solve with rpm-ostree reset run on a (previously) pinned deployment (through sudo ostree admin pin <insert number>). However, when used irresponsibly, this (i.e. layering) can outright destroy your otherwise very robust 'immutable' distro.

It's easier to teach people to be cautious than to teach how they should act accordingly. Hence, uBlue's documentation tends to be more conservative in order to protect (especially newer) users from shooting themselves in the foot.

Thank you for sharing! If you remember, could you share your findings?

Hehe. I agree that the community on Lemmy gives off more mature vibes. I suppose one should at least credit them for being idealistic enough to be on Lemmy rather than Reddit.

Thank you for spreading the positivity 😄!

Thanks for pointing that out!

Bazzite also includes an entry in their documentation in which they explain how theming on Bazzite works exactly.

FWIW, by creating your own images (through BlueBuild or tooling offered by uBlue) you could bake themes directly into those folders.

However, I totally understand why you'd not feel compelled to do as such 😅. Especially if your current distro/system works splendidly.

Sometimes, placing it to ~/.local/share/themes works as well*.

IIRC, any of the uBlue images offer to ship these by default. Hence, they might as well pick one of those instead.

I understand. And to be frank, I agree with you that perhaps it's too much focused on a particular set of things (i.e. gaming).

There's also Aurora and Bluefin (see uBlue's website) for those that seek a very similar experience but without the focused-on-gaming part. The reason I prefer Bazzite over those two is related to Waydroid (i.e. software to run Android (apps) on Linux). However, your mileage may vary.

Finally, uBlue used to dedicate resources and documentation on their base images; i.e. relatively not-opinionated images for Silverblue, Kinoite and Fedora Atomic with basically any desktop environment you could imagine plus hardware enablement. These are perhaps still worth considering. However, personally, I've been having a better time on Aurora/Bazzite/Bluefin.

You're welcome 😊!

I agree that Bazzite is very very good. So much so, that it's the first distro I recommend in person.

Enjoy 😉!

Yup. Here's the post as found on Mastodon by the developer that works on Steam on Linux on behalf of Valve.

ZSH through the excellent ZSH Quickstart Kit.

Can't agree more.

I believe Flatpak initially couldn't and/or didn't want to do CLI. At some point, it offered some basic functionality; I first noticed it on Bottles. But, it's pretty dire if no variation of top can be found as a Flatpak.

I wouldn't be surprised if most people are simply unaware that Flatpak can even do CLI. This inevitably also negatively affects its CLI ecosystem.

Several posters have argued that LMDE, like debian, is barebones, whereas LM is ideal for an end user with not much idea about linux

I believe I'm the only one in the previous post that used the term. But, I believe a misunderstanding has occurred. Debian, plain old Debian, is (relatively) bare-bones. And with this, I mean that extra tooling and what not is absent. Sure, these extra tooling etc come at the cost of what some might regard as bloat. But, ultimately, its absence should not affect performance in any significant way (so not positively, nor negatively). Thus, LMDE and Linux Mint are actually pretty close to one another. LMDE is basically just Linux Mint (Cinnamon edition) but with a Debian base instead of being based on Ubuntu.

I also want to future proof it as much as possible, which would mean using the OS/DE that uses less resources.

Excellent OP. Thank you for providing this insight on what's important for you. With this information we'll be able to offer better help. So, as you've excellently noticed already, Xfce is pretty good if you want a very functional machine that doesn't suck a lot of resources. So, I totally support your decision for Xfce over Cinnamon as Xfce is simply less resource intensive. However, 8 GB of RAM should be pretty fine. Even GNOME should run wonderfully on 8 GB of RAM, so Cinnamon should not cause any troubles. But, if you've still got concerns and if you're already on an SSD, then continue using Xfce as it's otherwise one of the better DEs out there. But, if you're not on an SSD yet, then consider slipping one inside; it will matter a lot.

Regarding your actual query, installing Xfce in retrospect to LMDE should work, but you might get yourself into more trouble than it's worth. Therefore, I'd advice you to simply get Linux Mint Xfce Edition and call it a day. Going for the Edge ISO (which by default comes with Cinnamon) for the latest (and greatest) kernel and retroactively trying to setup Xfce should (once again) cause you more troubles than it's worth it. So, in the end, I'd like to recommend you either Linux Mint Xfce Edition or MX Linux (which is based on Debian Stable (so not Ubuntu) and actually defaults to Xfce). Honestly, they're mostly two flavors/interpretations that try to accomplish very similar goals. So, you should be fine with either one of the two.