LMDE 6 has been officially released. The big deal about this is that it’s based on the recently released Debian 12 and also that being based on Debian LMDE is 100% community based.
If you’ve been disappointed by what the Linux corporations have been doing lately or don’t like the all-snap future that Ubuntu has opened, then this is the distro for you.
I’m running it as my daily driver and it works exactly like the regular Mint so you don’t lose anything. Clem and team have done a great job, even newbies could use Debian now.
Personally I think LMDE is the future of Linux as Ubuntu goes it’s own way, and this is a good thing for Mint and the Linux community. Let’s get back to community distros and move away from the corps.
EDIT: LMDE is 64bit only. There is no 32bit option.
Can someone explain to me how it differs from regular Debian Cinnamon? Is it as secure, with updates and all?
Underneath it’s exactly the same and you will get all the same security updates. However Debian will not release any further updates to the Cinnamon desktop until Debian 13. And they don’t theme it, your get the basic grey version m
Linux Mint Debian Edition will include the latest Cinnamon desktop and it will be continually updated by the Mint team because they are the creators of the Cinnamon desktop. So you’ll likely have a better version of cinnamon on LMDE.
Plus they theme it out of the box. And LMDE includes other Mint utilities like Warpinator and Timeshift. These will also get updated sooner than plain Debian.
And of course you are more likely to get support on Linux Mint compared to Debian
Nice, thanks for the explanation!
I did have really good experiences with LM, notably
- timeshift backups
- unobtrusive updates
- fully automatic LUKS unlock and mount
But it broke for me. Also it wasnt fully Ubuntu, which was a hassle too.
I wonder why it broke? Did you reach out to support? They would have helped you.
I also used to use full Ubuntu but I’m fed up with the snaps nonsense.
I even went so far as to uninstall the snap system, yet somehow on doing apt update, it freaking re-installed it 🤬
That’s when I understood what Mint was about and why it’s so great.
Moving to LMDE I’ve taken a full step away from Ubuntu all together.
I would’ve jumped on this instantly, but I finally landed on a Min21 configuration that works well. New laptop => new hardware => need new nvidia driver => need new kernel.
Which kernel does LMDE currently ship with?
so what would be the difference between LMDE and Debian with cinnamon DE
Literally the only difference is that regular Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu and LMDE is based on Debian.
So LM will use the Ubuntu repo and any additions to the code Ubuntu made, whereas LMDE will use the Debian repos and their code.
At the moment LMDE actually has a newer kernel (6) than LM (5) and newer apps, but that will change with the next version of Linux Mint when it should catch up.
And finally, LMDE is also available in 32bit as well as 64bit, whereas LM is 64bit only.
Now if it had
- wayland support
- immutable variant
It maaay be a nice option.
Neither of those features are 100% production ready, even on the most cutting edge system.
Even if you are running KDE or GNOME, chances are your apps would still require X.
Why would you want immutable? That would be for either containers or embedded, none of which is Linux Mint’s use case.
If you’re looking to explore these cutting-edge features, Linux Mint is not for you.
Xwayland
Rpm-ostree works perfectly well for many users. Flatpak is not production ready, but if you do background updates and not that often, you can totally just layer everything you want.
Immutable is not cutting edge, is simply a traced, resettable, secure system. You can reset it with one command. But you can also install as many native packages as you want, simply that updating will take a bit longer then. But updates are done in the background, I dont know if by default, but there is a systemd service.
Flatpak is more mature than you’d think. It also seen more adoption than Wayland (not exactly apples to apples…).
Immutable concept may not be new, but the current implementations are. Even the pioneers such as NixOS, Fedora, and openSUSE are still ironing out quirks as we are having this discussion. Even NixOS, the current top leading, is having performance issues.
Linux Mint have snapshot system. It is not perfect (certainly won’t beat immutables), but ot certainly works well for its use cases. Once again, being the latest and greatest is never its use case.
I’m not a fan of the immutable distro and I think it goes against the LM philosophy. The user should always have full control over their system.
They are looking at Wayland but for now X works better and with more applications. Reliability is a top priority for LM so they won’t just change to Wayland and have users systems break.
I’m sure in a few years they’ll have Wayland
Still no Wayland, right?
