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Re: [LUG] Linux Mint -- and Debian

 

On 23 Mar, 2011, at 8:11 am, Neil Winchurst wrote:

Any Debian experts out there? Does anyone else on the list use Mint? I would be interested to hear what other list members think about all this.

Hardly an expert, but I am a long-time user of all three.

First thing to say is that just as Mint derives (has derived) from Ubuntu, Ubuntu derives from debian. They're part of the same family, with .deb/dpkg/apt package management.

You can plot Debian - Ubuntu - Mint in that order on any of several axes: increasing usability, decreasing free-as-in-speech-ness, increasing out-of-the-box interoperability. Having used and enjoyed all three, I find I now use Debian testing almost exclusively. "Testing" in debian is more solid and reliable than lots of other so- called release-quality software, and is very up-to-date in terms of packages. Now that the Mint team has a few years of experience of maintaining it, I can see that they might well drop their intermediate dependency on Ubuntu. So long as that's not false confidence, it should speed things up slightly for them.

In short, debian testing for geeks, Mint for your mum and the Windoze transitioner, Ubuntu for The Rest Of Us. Or something like that.

--
Phil Hudson                  http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz
@UWascalWabbit                 PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63


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