 A couple of days ago, Linux Mint had a big release. They released Linux Mint Debian Edition, version 5, codenamed LC. And I'm going to take a quick first look at Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 here inside a virtual machine. But before getting into that, I do want to mention that, you know, I find Linux Mint Debian Edition actually rather appealing. I actually think Linux Mint probably should focus more on their Debian Edition because I've never quite understood why Linux Mint, which really doesn't like Ubuntu, like, like the decisions Ubuntu makes, the Linux Mint team and many of the people that use Linux Mint have serious issues with canonical and Ubuntu. And they want to not necessarily be tied to Ubuntu. But you base a distribution off of Ubuntu. And then you try to rip out all of the Ubuntu kind of things out of Ubuntu. Like snap packages, for example, just one off the top of my head. And it's never really made sense to me. It seemed like that's more work than it needs to be. Why not just base directly off of Debian, kind of like Ubuntu does, right? They base directly off of Debian. They make Debian a new user-friendly distribution. I think Linux Mint could do the same to Debian. Linux Mint could be the old Ubuntu, you know, the Ubuntu before GNOME 3 and Unity kind of fractured the Linux desktop community. I think Linux Mint could actually capitalize on an opportunity here. So what I'm going to do today, let me go to the release announcement here. And I will link to the release announcement in the show description is Linux Mint Debian Edition 5LC has been released. And they go on to tell you a little bit about the Debian Edition. One thing I do want to mention, because some people are confused. They think the Linux Mint Debian Edition is going to be something drastically different than Linux Mint, the standard edition based on Ubuntu. Typically the Ubuntu LTS, right? Well, Linux Mint Debian Edition bases off a Debian stable, I believe. It's designed to be a stable distribution. So don't think you're going to switch over from standard Linux Mint to Linux Mint Debian Edition and get like some kind of rolling release that's based off a SID or something like that. That's not the case. Again, this is designed to be stable. Rock solid stable, Debian stable. The Mint team writes in the release announcement that the Debian Edition is a project. It's kind of an experiment. They keep the sling around basically as a proof of concept of what happens if Ubuntu ever disappears. Ubuntu ceases to exist. What happens to Linux Mint? Well, they have a backup plan, right? They have the Debian Edition. And the other thing they mention is that they like making sure that all of the Linux Mint stuff that they work on, all the packages, they all work with Debian, all the custom Mint packages work on Debian. They don't want to be, if you only work on the Ubuntu edition because Ubuntu is so unique and so everything is in-house and kind of Ubuntu specific. You don't want to make Ubuntu specific applications that don't necessarily work on other distributions, especially if one day you want to rebase your distribution from Ubuntu to something else like Debian. So that's kind of why this exists. It looks like I'm going to need at least 20 gigs of disk space for storage here. I gave this virtual machine exactly 20 gigs of disk space. So hopefully that is enough. So let me go ahead and switch over to this VM here. And I'm going to go ahead and run through a quick installation. So we boot directly into the live environment. The live environment, of course, is the Cinnamon desktop. Linux Mint Debian Edition is going to use the Cinnamon desktop environment. I'm going to go ahead and click install Linux Mint. And I really like the welcome screen. Welcome to Linux Mint Debian Edition 5, let's go. So I'm going to click let's go. And I'm not sure what installer they're using. This doesn't look like the standard Ubiquiti installer that typically Ubuntu uses. It doesn't look like the Calamari installer either. So I'm not sure what installer they're using. English United States is my language. So I'm going to click next here. And then let's use our time zone. It's correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me, America, Chicago. That works for me. So I'm going to click next keyboard layout, English US. I'm going to click next. I will say now that we've gotten into more of the slideshow, it does look like they're using, it looks like the Ubiquiti installer, the standard Ubuntu Ubiquiti installer. Let's create our username and password. So I'm going to call my user dt, the computer name. I'm going to say vert lmde. And then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the dt user. So and then log in automatically. I'm going to leave that ticked off because I create a strong and complicated password. So I have to log in. So I want to make sure I have to log in. Require my password to log in is ticked on. That's what I want. Encrypt my home folder. I typically don't do that on these VMs. But if you wanted to, you could just tick that on. And what that will do is you'll have to enter a password to actually decrypt your home folder. So if your computer is ever stolen, for example, no one can ever access the stuff on that drive. And then erase disk and install lmde on it. That's ticked on by default. If you wanted to, you could choose some other options like manual partitioning. But I'm going to do the erase the entire disk, give the whole disk to lmde. And then it's asking, what disk? There's only one virtual hard drive in this virtual machine. So there's only one for me to choose from. I'm just going to go ahead and click Next. And it's going to warn me that it's about to format the drive. So click Yes. There's no partition table was found on the drive. So do you want the installer to create a set of partitions for you? This will erase all data present on the disk. So it's saying, hey, you haven't partitioned a drive yet with gparted or fdisk, given that's typically how you do on, especially, distributions that are not user-friendly. You have to manually partition your drives. But it's saying, hey, we'll partition your drives for you if you want. So I'll click Yes to that just to see if it works. Install grub to slash dev slash vda. Again, that's the only drive for this. And the last part of the installation here is the summary. The language looks good. Locale looks good. Keyboard layout looks good. Our username, all of the partitions look good. Let's go ahead and click Install. And this portion of the installation typically takes about 10 minutes on my machine. And I feel pretty confident that this is, in fact, the ubiquity installer. Now that we've gotten to the slideshow and the arrows, yeah, this looks very familiar to the Ubuntu installer. While the installation continues, one thing I should mention, I don't think I mentioned earlier, if you go to the download page for Linux Mint Debian Edition, they have a 64-bit version and a 32-bit version. Now that's very important because Ubuntu, of course, is 64-bit only. Debian still has 32-bit ISOs that allows Linux Mint Debian Edition to also ship a 32-bit edition, because that's something that is quite rare these days with Linux distributions. There's very few that offer 32-bit ISOs anymore. And the installation has completed. The installation process took maybe 10 minutes. And to complete the installation, of course, we need to reboot the computer. So I'm going to choose Yes for Restart Computer. And we come to our login screen. It looks like they're using LightDM as their login manager. And we boot into our freshly installed Linux Mint Debian Edition. We get a driver warning, a video driver warning, here inside the virtual machine, because the Cinnamon desktop and virtual machines sometimes don't play nicely together. Let me change the screen resolution here. So I'm going to go into displays, change to 1920 by 1080. I'm going to tell it to keep this configuration. And it should remember that from here on out when I come back to this virtual machine. And the Linux Mint Debian Edition, like the standard edition, we get a welcome screen. We get this welcome message. If you don't want this to start up every time you log in, you could tick that off. I'll leave it ticked on for now. We've got first steps tells you a little bit about how you can customize the Cinnamon desktop environment, how you can create snapshots using Timeshift, how you can install your multimedia codecs, which I believe did that not get installed automatically? Let me launch that. It says install additional software. I'm going to tick the arrow there to get the additional description. And I'm going to choose install. I'm going to go to details again. And it looks like it's pulling some stuff down from Debian Bullseye repositories. So that should give us the multimedia codecs we need for multimedia playback. So if you're going to play DVDs and Blu-rays and things like that with your video player, you're going to want those multimedia codecs. Otherwise, you're going to be in for a bedtime. We have to give it our sudo password. Anytime you add or remove software on Linux, you have to give it a root or a sudo password. And we should mention, because this is based off of Debian, you can actually use su, you can you log in as root, you have a root account. Or if you want to, if you want to, you can actually disable the root account and use sudo. And that's what Ubuntu does. That's also what Mainline Linux Mint does. And that is also what Linux Mint Debian edition does, is there's no root account. You have sudo privileges if you need that. So I can't actually su. If I su, nothing is going to happen because we never added a root password, right? So there's no account to log in with su. So other things we could do on the first step screen is we could update the system. Now this was just released about three days ago. So I doubt there's any updates, especially. So again, this is not a rolling release. It's based off of Debian. So I wouldn't imagine there's that many updates. We could launch the software manager and we could also go ahead and enable our firewall. If I choose launch, it's going to ask for sudo privileges to start and stop the firewall and they are using UFW, the uncomplicated firewall which is actually a command line program. This is GUFW, the graphical user interface to UFW. And if you wanted to start the firewall, right now it's turned off, I think. Yeah, if I just hit the slider just one time, yeah. Now it should be enabled. You see firewall enabled and I just closed that. Of course you can set up some rules and some IP rules. You could block certain things, allow certain things. Let's go into the documentation screen and we could launch documentation. I'm assuming that would just launch our web browser and probably take us to the Linux Mint website. Yes, it does, very cool. We have various languages to get documentation in. I really like the new redesigned Linux Mint website. There for a long time, Linux Mint's website was kind of horrid. It looked very bad. It had this really pale, nasty looking green color and the design looked really old. Like a website somebody designed 20 years ago. But now it looks fresh, it looks modern. I quite like their website. The only other thing in the welcome screen is help information where you can go to their web forms or the IRC chat room and get support for Linux Mint. And there's a contribute tab for those of you that want to contribute. I'm assuming if you wanted to become part of the project or donate financially to help support the team, I'm gonna close the welcome screen. I'm not gonna spend too much time taking a look at Linux Mint Debian Edition because it's gonna be almost exactly like mainline Linux Mint other than under the hood being based off of Debian. But what you see on top of that is all the same. It's the Cinnamon desktop environment. It's all the same applications that you've seen before. Various GNOME applications under graphics. We have a document scanner, not much else picks. Under internet, of course, we have Firefox. As our browser, Thunderbird. As our email client, HexChat. Of course, it's the IRC chat client. So in the welcome screen, if you'd chosen to go to the IRC chat room to get Linux Mint support, it would have launched HexChat and taken you to the Linux Mint channel. Under office, we have the LibreOffice suite, sound and video. We have our video player is actually celluloid, our audio player is rhythm box. Again, if you've seen mainline Linux Mint, everything here looks very familiar because really the whole point of this is to bring that same polish, that same feeling of mainline Linux Mint's Cinnamon Edition to a Debian flavor. Again, just as a backup plan, just in case they ever need to migrate from Ubuntu and rebase off of Debian. Now, some of the packages that are installed may be a little older basing off of Debian stable rather than Ubuntu's LTS. But Ubuntu LTS also bases off of Debian stable. So you should see a lot of the same packages. Like if I do a uname-r, that will give us the kernel version 5.10. If I do htop, let's see about system resource usage, we don't have htop installed. So let's do a sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade. Let's go ahead and update and upgrade the system. And then I'm going to install htop. And it looks like we just have a handful of packages that need an update. Firefox is one of the packages that needs to update, which makes sense. Even on a stable release, web browsers get updated often for security reasons. One thing I just noticed, let me move my head out of the way, guys, is this download of Firefox, this update is going to take 14 minutes. I'm not going to wait that long. I don't know why that is so slow downloading because I don't think that's like a me problem. That's not a network issue here at the office today. My internet speeds are running just fine. I think that is a repository problem there. That's going to take a long time to download that update of Firefox. Well, we resink the repositories. So we did that sudo apt update. So we got a fresh sync of the repositories. So I'll skip actually upgrading everything and just do a sudo apt install htop, which is a very small program. So that should install hopefully in just a couple of seconds, it does. And now let's run htop. And the Cinnamon desktop, it's using not much CPU, 4%. Let it settle down. Yeah, about 4 to 5% of the CPU, which is expected. We're not doing much here. It shouldn't be using much CPU at all. The RAM, we're using 830 megabytes of the six gigs of RAM I gave this VM. That's pretty standard for the Cinnamon desktop environment. Cinnamon is not the lightest desktop environment, but it's not the heaviest either. That window that just popped up. And that was to let me know that there are updates available because I ran the sudo apt update in the terminal, but I didn't do the sudo apt upgrade part because I canceled it. Then we get the graphical tool coming up saying, hey, there's an update available. You need to update some packages. So I closed that terminal. One thing I should just briefly look at, just before I completely get out of the terminal, I'm gonna do, well, we don't need sudo privileges for this. I'm gonna do a apt list space dash dash installed. I gave it three dashes instead of just the two. If I do that, that should list out every package installed with the apt package manager. Now I'm gonna pipe that through wc-l to get a line count. 2008 packages are installed on Linux Mint Debian Edition. Now let's talk about just the general look and feel of the desktop. Even in this VM, and again, Cinnamon doesn't work that great in virtual machines, but everything is peppy like the animations and everything seems smooth. Let's open the file manager. So this will be the Nemo file manager. If I do about, this is Nemo 5.2.4. And yeah, everything looks good. We've already seen the terminal, Firefox, the terminal, if I just move a window around, there's a little bit of glitching here in the VM, but on physical hardware, I'm sure all of this would be smooth as butter. If I right-click on the desktop, and I choose change desktop background, of course, it's gonna be the same Linux Mint wallpaper as that you've seen in the standard Linux Mint edition. So nothing new to see here, but I will change the wallpaper to this wallpaper just because I think that looks really cool. So that was just a really quick, mainly installation of Linux Mint Debian Edition 5. We really didn't take that much of a detailed look around the desktop because again, the Cinnamon desktop, you've seen it on the standard edition, you've seen it on the Debian Edition. I really liked what they've done with that Ubiquiti installer. They've really customized it quite a bit, and I like the look and feel of that thing. I also really love their welcome screen. They had everything a new user could possibly want in that welcome screen as far as getting your multimedia codecs, updating the system, installing drivers, installing software, enabling or disabling a firewall. That was really nice to see so much packed into that little welcome screen. Overall, I think Linux Mint Debian Edition 5. I think it's great. Just a few minutes I've spent with it, but I think the Linux Mint Debian Edition as a project is great. Again, I don't understand why Linux Mint still bases off of Ubuntu, when clearly I don't think they want to, right? They spend so much time taking Ubuntu and then ripping everything out of Ubuntu to make Linux Mint. It doesn't make sense. Just base off of something where you don't have to fight all the time to get things to work the way you want it to work. And I think if Linux Mint made the decision to drop Ubuntu and rebase everything off of Debian, I think all of their user base would be happy with that decision. I don't think anybody that uses Linux Mint would be unhappy if the next version of Linux Mint just based off of Debian and not Ubuntu. I think everybody would be okay with that. Not only the people using Linux Mint, I think they would attract more people outside of Linux Mint to actually give Linux Mint a try because many people have a negative perception of Ubuntu and canonical. They don't want to use Ubuntu. Many of them don't want to use Ubuntu-based distributions because they have that much vitriol, that much hate of it, canonical and Ubuntu. So I think Linux Mint, if they dropped Ubuntu and based off of Debian could actually see a resurgence in popularity. Not that they're not a very popular distribution now, but I think they would gain even more users by making that change. Now, before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of the show. Devon Gabe James Maxim, Matt Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott, Wes Allen, Armored Dragon, Chuck Commander, Gregory DiYokai, Dylan George Lee, Linux Ninja, Mike Erion, Alexander, Peter Arjanvedor, Polytech Rip Prophet, Steven and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon, without these guys. This episode you just watched would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys in the community. If you like my work, you want to see more great videos about Linux and free and open source software. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon, all right guys. Peace. We need a Linux Mint Arch Edition.