Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 'Faye' enters Beta

Anyhow, most of us are just curious, not trying to question or attack Mint .

Could have fooled me, to be honest.

That does make feel bad and I want apologize. I'm not sure what it was in my reply that came of as antagonistic?

Not you, more slaap. Of course slaapliedje has this tendency any time any distro whatsoever is mentioned to say basically "Why would anyone ever have any reason to use or develop any other distro but Debian? Gosh they must all be morons for even contemplating such a thing!"
So I can't really take it as being against Mint in particular. Still kind of rude.

Not you, more slaap. Of course slaapliedje has this tendency any time any distro whatsoever is mentioned to say basically "Why would anyone ever have any reason to use or develop any other distro but Debian? Gosh they must all be morons for even contemplating such a thing!"
So I can't really take it as being against Mint in particular. Still kind of rude.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, guess I should have phrased my reply differently. I obviously only speak for myself.

It's not just non-techy people who like Mint. I'm a computer nerd since before it was cool, with well over two decades on Linux now, and Mint serves me very well at home and at work. It's a polished distro with an out-of-the-box desktop experience that requires very little tweaking to suit my tastes and use cases.

If that makes you doubt my Linux chops, maybe it helps if I tell you that I ran Gentoo for a couple of years as my daily driver back when it was relatively new and anything but user friendly.

Dude, I agree with you, I really don't know where you get that idea, because I didn't.

This is the page with the iso links

LMDE6 Beta

It actually runs pretty well, has a codec installer provided.
Has kernel 6.1
You can install the nvidia drivers with the cuda developer repo
Cuda Driver Link 535*

Anyhow, most of us are just curious, not trying to question or attack Mint .

Could have fooled me, to be honest.

That does make feel bad and I want apologize. I'm not sure what it was in my reply that came of as antagonistic?

Not you, more slaap. Of course slaapliedje has this tendency any time any distro whatsoever is mentioned to say basically "Why would anyone ever have any reason to use or develop any other distro but Debian? Gosh they must all be morons for even contemplating such a thing!"
So I can't really take it as being against Mint in particular. Still kind of rude.

Mint just has a weird space between wanting to be a better Distro than Ubuntu, and then a better Distro than Debian, when in some cases it'd be better to just improve Debian, no?

Granted, I'm not attempting to be antagonistic. To tell you why I use Debian and have mostly stopped using 'Debian based' distributions... It's because I've literally seen dozens of them come and go over the decades. They always are like 'well, we're Debian except just a few package differences...' but then those package differences break trying to install standard debian packages in them.

Even Ubuntu, 'we're just Debian, but release every 6 months and based on latest gnome' have now derived so terribly from a Debian install to be barely recognizable.

I'd probably actually use Mint if they had a Gnome set up, and they do not. They seem to specifically target all the smaller DEs, which is actually a good thing as it'll give them more of a chance to succeed.

The big industry shakeup with Red Hat saying they don't want people playing with their toys anymore, brings up the potential that Mint created the LMDE for in the first place, because who knows if Canonical will be purchased by someone and then close off as much as they can. Debian is one of the largest (if not the largest) community drive distributions, and can't exactly be 'owned' by any entity. Which makes it great for always being open, but less great for being Enterprise ready for most people.

But yes, there is a problem with people creating so many iterations of 'I can make a better Debian' when they could actually attempt to make Debian better. Ha, kind of the equivalent of just divorcing your wife to find a younger one that is almost the exact same, but smiles at you better, when you could have just asked your first wife to smile more.

This is the page with the iso links

LMDE6 Beta

It actually runs pretty well, has a codec installer provided.
Has kernel 6.1
You can install the nvidia drivers with the cuda developer repo
Cuda Driver Link 535*

Does LMDE only have the Cinnamon flavor? Seems normal Mint has XFCE, Cinnamon and Mate.

Granted, I'm not attempting to be antagonistic.

And yet you are succeeding.

Does LMDE only have the Cinnamon flavor? Seems normal Mint has XFCE, Cinnamon and Mate.

The installer was Cinnamon Only haven't checked to see if they support others.

The main advantage of LMDE over Debian + Cinnamon for experienced users who like this DE and Mint's Xapp family of programs is that you get all their upgrades against the same base system. For example, LMDE5 started with Cinnamon 5.4 and now is on 5.8.x getting all the new features users of main Mint edition got with LM 21.0 and LM 21.1. This is not possible in vanilla Debian.

For newbies, niceties like enabling os-prober (they dual-boot in the beginning, no?), non-free firmware software sources (needed in the past) and contrib / backports repos out of the box (still needed), flatpak/flathub support in the Software Manager are not something to dismiss. It takes 5 minutes to me to add them but for new users setting them up can be confusing and time consuming.

Apart from all these, Cinnamon runs predictably well everywhere, Debian, Manjaro, Fedora, Armbian (!) you name it.

The main advantage of LMDE over Debian + Cinnamon for experienced users who like this DE and Mint's Xapp family of programs is that you get all their upgrades against the same base system. For example, LMDE5 started with Cinnamon 5.4 and now is on 5.8.x getting all the new features users of main Mint edition got with LM 21.0 and LM 21.1. This is not possible in vanilla Debian.

For newbies, niceties like enabling os-prober (they dual-boot in the beginning, no?), non-free firmware software sources (needed in the past) and contrib / backports repos out of the box (still needed), flatpak/flathub support in the Software Manager are not something to dismiss. It takes 5 minutes to me to add them but for new users setting them up can be confusing and time consuming.

Apart from all these, Cinnamon runs predictably well everywhere, Debian, Manjaro, Fedora, Armbian (!) you name it.

Looks like Bookworm is right in the middle with 5.6 of Cinnamon.

On the note of os-prober. Anyone notice that newer distros have mostly been disabling this now by default, when before it was default to look for other OS's? Granted I've given up on grub for the most part and use rEFInd, but that's due to me triple-booting.)

For newbies who just want software to be available, agreed having the repos there from install is nice. There used to be a few things I'd add for people when I'd set them up a Debian system. Used to be the firmware/contrib/non-free repos, get the drivers installed, and whatever base apps they'd tend to want to use (though that usually didn't require anything as a base gnome or kde install pretty much covers everything).

These days a fresh install basically just needs nvidia added (if that is in there) and steam. Depending on the person, I'll enable flatpak.

Granted, I'm not attempting to be antagonistic.

And yet you are succeeding.

Have to succeed at something!