Linux Mint Daryna Debian ALPHA 023

This ALPHA release comes as a non-installable liveCD and gives an idea of how Linux Mint would behave if it was to switch base and adopt Debian as its supporting technology.

It is not intented to be used as your main operating system but to give you a technological preview of how Linux Mint would behave if it was based on Debian Testing.

Debian is a rolling distribution. Compared to Ubuntu, Debian would allow Linux Mint to be faster and to feel snappier and it would ease the process of migrating from one release to another since the Debian base would constantly get updated underneath the Linux Mint desktop.

This experimentation shows us that:

• It is possible for Linux Mint to easily switch base (if Ubuntu disappeared or went in a different way)
• A Debian Testing base would make Linux Mint faster.
• A Debian Testing base would let users transparently go from one release to another by simply applying updates in mintUpdate (release would be like simple snapshots in time)
• A Debian Testing base would be easier to maintain in the long term for the Linux Mint dev team
• A Debian Testing base would not always be stable, and this would represent temporary problems for both developers and users.
• A Debian Testing base would lack the many innovations and improvements developped by the Ubuntu developers, putting more pressure on the Linux Mint team to achieve the same level of polish.

The interesting thing about this experiment will be to see if it still behaves fine in 6 or 12 months time.

In the meantime, you can have a look at it. The ISO acts as a non-installable live CD which you can boot on your computer. You can download it at here.