Say what? There is a Wheezy (Debian Stable) repository from MATE.

you know.. that might work better.. going with the stable package, which should surely work and then add the testing repos from there and upgrade.. so then.. latest stable release, uncheck everything, add testing and mate repos upgrade, then install mate and i should be good to go

believe it or not.. ive installed arch a few times, even installed gentoo before and my first successful distro.. the one where i felt i made the most progress in learning and understanding linux, and getting things i needed to work, was i believe slackware 10.2, havent used it since though.. so im no stranger to linux.. just found gentoo took too long to install things, slackware was too high maintainence having to maintain all packages myself, and that took a while too, and arch.. well, to be honest i could easily go back to using arch, i have zero issues with it

bottom line is.. LMDE seems for me to be that sort of in between that doesnt seem well supported yet, seems 90% of all documentation or information i find online is either for ubuntu, debian, or arch, so id rather just stick with the main distro right now as opposed to a less-supported derivative

If you don't mind me saying that is just the wrong way to go about it, if this is what you are thinking of doing save yourself time and energy by pointing LMDE to the official Debian repositories, add the MATE repositories, remove the Mint repositories and upgrade from there.

Just change your sources.list to
changing the ftp.au.debian to suit your local repository location.

k3lt01.. i think the purpose of doing the clean install would be to get rid of mints default packages completely and have only ones from debian or other repos (like the mate repo)

I guess I was not as succinct as I should have been. My bad. I was referring to Mate not being in Debian's Stable repository. To be honest, I am not very knowledgeable about third-party repositories with packages for Debian, because I stay away from them. Of course Mate could be installed on a Stable system from an outside source, but as always, if third-party repositories break the system, the user gets to keep the pieces.

That would be a good reason to do it but if you start with Stable, then update to Testing you're going to have old defaults from Stable still there. If you want to use Testing install Testing, don't install Stable and then download everything all over again.

So use Arch it'll take what 40 minutes it install? Then you can add the mate repo and install that and move on frome there.

well, i cant exactly install arch all off the top of my head.. im only able to do it with my laptop next to me so i can follow each step quite carefully... most the steps could be automated though... but.. i dont know what to do if i try to get debian testing working.. the ISOs i used just wont work.. i could try ones from a couple weeks ago and hope they do

I made a book many moons a go and keep it up to date..

The install process it's to much to overcome

though i like arch.. i feel its just canadas attempt to making their own distro borrowing a number of features from debian and ubuntu, but for whatever reason attempt to force people to go through the pain in the rear end installation that for the most part, could be automated... debian unstable is essentially "rolling" and testing is just an added filter for better reliability..

the downside however, is that most .deb packages you find now on certain websites for software not available in repos, are going to be made for ubuntu.. i cant stand ubuntu and i find it incredibly annoying that theyve seemed to have hijacked almost anything deb related

a debian testng CD iso, not a netinst just finished downloading.. so im going to try that, see if the mouse and keyboard work, if not, then im going to keep trying netinst images one at a time going back until something does

i downloaded the 32-bit version of debian testing CD1 to install on my laptop first.. see how it differs from LMDE and ive been itching to get rid of windows 8 from it anyway.. added the MATE repository for jessie, notices the main testing repository was missing (which explained why i couldnt find important packages like xorg).. so i added that, update, and im installing the MATE desktop on top of a barebones CLI installation of debian right now

the hilarious part was i kept trying to find my old /home/Downloads folder.. was afraid i accidently reformatted my /home partition, was close to freaking out before i remembers.. this is an entirely different computer, the /home partition i was looking for is on another computer entirely