 Today, I'm gonna be taking a look at the new release of Linux Mint Debian Edition, or LMDE, as it's commonly referred to. I'm gonna take a look at LMDE version 6. This was just released just a few days ago. What makes LMDE really interesting is the fact that Linux Mint Debian Edition is based off of Debian. That's kind of all it is. It's Linux Mint, just like standard Linux Mint, so instead of basing on Ubuntu, it bases off of Debian. But the goal of LMDE is essentially to be just like the flagship version of Linux Mint, to look and feel and function exactly the same, just based off of Debian. So I've downloaded the latest ISO. I'm gonna run through a quick installation of LMDE 6 inside a VM. One thing to note is I grabbed the 64-bit ISO, because they're basing off of Debian, and Debian still offers 32-bit ISOs. LMDE also offers both a 64-bit and a 32-bit ISO. And that's quite rare these days, because most Linux distributions do not support 32-bit architecture anymore. So I'm gonna go ahead and boot into the live environment, and it automatically logs us into a live environment here. This of course is the Cinnamon desktop environment. I'm gonna go ahead and run through the installations. I'll click the icon for install Linux Mint. And the installer launches. It says, welcome to LMDE 6. The program will ask you some questions and set up LMDE on your computer. Let's go. All right, first things first, you need to choose the language. For me, English US is the correct choice. So I'll just click next here. Let me move my head out of the way, or actually, what I'll do is I'll just move this window out of the way. There we go. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. I'm assuming it's pulling that from some geolocation information. And then keyboard layout, English US is correct for me. So I'll click next on that. And then let's create our username and password. I'll call my user DT, then we need to select the computer's host name. So I'm gonna call this computer LMDE-vert. And then we need to create a strong and complicated password for our DT user. And then repeat the strong and complicated password. And then do I want to log in automatically? No, I like leaving that ticked off because I want to have to enter a password to get into any computer for privacy reasons. And then require my password to log in, of course, is ticked on. Do I want to encrypt my home folder? It's not necessary here for me in the VM. But if you were doing this on physical hardware, it would be a good idea to tick that on. So go ahead and tick it back off though for this VM and choose next here. And then automated installation. So this is selecting a disk to install to. So let me click on the dropdown. There is only one virtual hard drive in this virtual machine. So I only have the one drive that I can select from if you had multiple drives in your machine, though, you would obviously have more than one drive in the dropdown menu. Obviously, make sure to select the correct drive before running the installation. And then we have some encryption options. Once again, if you're doing this on physical hardware, you may want to encrypt your hard drive that just adds an extra level of security. So you'd have to enter a password to even, you know, boot into the computer. For me, I'm not going to take on any of this manual partitioning. So what this is, if you're not doing the automated installation, you would have to manually partition your drive. But for me, I'm just going to go with their automatic installation. I'm going to go ahead and click next here. And it says, we're going to delete all the data on that drive. Are you sure? Yes. It says, no partition table was found on the drive. Do you want the installer to create a set of partitions for you? So it's basically saying, hey, we can automatically create a partition scheme for you. Yes. I mean, that's why I chose the automated installation is I want you to do that for me. If I wanted to manually partition it myself, of course, I would have chosen the manual partitioning. Now it's asking where to install the grub bootloader. So I'm just going to choose the default option in the list and click next. And then we get a summary of all of our selections thus far. And then click the install button and away we go. This portion of the installation typically takes about five to 10 minutes on my machine. So I'm going to step away for a bit, grab me a cup of coffee. I'll be back once LMDE 6 has completed installation. The installation has been running for about 10 minutes or so now. And I thought it was getting really close to being done because the progress bar here was at 100%. And then it went to the next screen where it said removing live installation packages. So I guess packages that are not needed after installation. And it hung there for what seemed like, I don't know, three or four minutes. So if you get to that part of the installer and it hangs, it looks like it eventually does proceed. So that's just something to be aware of. And the installation has completed. We get a little pop-up window that says installation finished. You need to restart your computer to use your newly installed Linux Mint Debian Edition. So do you want to go ahead and restart now? Yes. It says remove the installation media and press Enter to continue. So if you're doing this on physical hardware, unplug the USB stick, right, and then finish the reboot. And it reboots just fine. We get our grub screen. And we come to the login manager. It looks like they're using LightDM for the login manager. Let me go ahead and enter my super secure password. And we boot into the Cinnamon desktop environment. We have our little welcome application, a little greeter to tell us a little bit about Linux Mint. We'll come back to this in just a second. Because the first thing I want to do is change the screen resolution. So let me go ahead and type display here in the menu and set the resolution to 1920 by 1080. And I'm going to hit Apply. And I'm going to tell it to keep this configuration. So it's going to save it. And every time I open this VM from this day forward, it will know I want 1920 by 1080 resolution in the Cinnamon desktop environment. Now let me go ahead and unminimize the welcome application, welcome to Linux Mint. So basically, there's not much difference between LMDE and your standard Linux Mint Cinnamon. So we're not going to cover most of this, because this is exactly the same as standard Linux Mint. You have your first steps where you go ahead and choose your desktop colors. So this would be some of the theming options and accent colors and things like that. So if I click Launch, here we go. We have our themes. Do you want a mixed theme? Do you want a dark mode or a light mode for me? I prefer dark. If you wanted to change the accent color, you can, being that this is Linux Mint, let's choose a minty kind of accent color for things. And we'll close that out. And we have system snapshots. So this would be setting up time shift for taking backups, multimedia codecs. So that's installing third-party proprietary multimedia codecs needed for certain media formats. And we have our update manager. And let's go ahead and launch this. So the update manager is a very simple tool. You can see welcome to the update manager. You click the button that says install updates. And you know, away you go there. And it says, do you want to switch to a local mirror? Because I guess that would be faster. Yes, I want faster mirrors. Let me go ahead and give them a pseudo password. You can see the system is up to date because this is a rather recent release. And there's nothing that needs to be updated right now. Now one thing we should take a look at because this is, I guess, slightly different is the software manager. They spent a lot of work here in recent releases of Linux Mint working on the software center. You can see right now it's generating a cache. So one moment. So essentially it's got to do a pseudo apt update, right? To refresh the mirrors that way it shows us the correct software, correct versions of software in the software center. And it finished that sync of the software center. The software center, I find very attractive. It's got a lot of information packed into really kind of a small little application, right? Because you get the banner at the top where you can see right now the banners is pushing slack. It's a proprietary piece of software. And because it's proprietary, it's not found in the standard Debian repositories. So it has to be installed via FlatHub. It's a flat pack. And that's really the reason I opened the software center is to show you that with LMDE, their software center, it offers packages as either Debian packages or as flat packs because some things only will be available as a flat pack. Again, proprietary software, for example. Some things will be available as both Debian packages or flat packs. And obviously you probably want to go with the flat pack if you need the latest and greatest version of that particular program. Now if you're only wanting the most stable desktop experience possible, probably sticking with just the standard Debian packages would be the way to go. One of the things I really appreciate about this software center is it's very clear exactly what you're installing as far as whether it's a Debian package or a flat pack. You can see, if I install Signal, it's a flat pack, right? If I install Sublime Text, it's a Debian package because there's no FlatHub logo underneath Sublime Text, which is kind of interesting because Sublime is proprietary software, but I'm wondering, do they have like some, I do know that Debian now has a non-free repository of software. I wonder if that is also being used by Linux Mint or if this is something they've added themselves to their own repository. You can see Install and we have the option of the system package, so that's the Debian package, or we can install the flat pack for Sublime. For me, I'm gonna decline installing either. These days, you guys know I'm more of an Emacs guy, but I really love that it's obvious what you're installing as far as which package format. I'm gonna go ahead and close the software center. Other than that, all the rest of the welcome application is the same as it is on standard Linux Mint. Same thing with the applications that are installed. Again, it tries to basically be the same Linux Mint that you know and love, the one that's based off of Ubuntu, the same as the one that's based off of Debian. So really, not much to see here. One thing they did mention is they worked a little bit on some of the theming. So I'm gonna go into themes here and right now we have the Mint Y style theming. We also have the Mint X style theming. There's also this one here, Mint L, which is a new theme. Well, actually it's not a new theme. It's a new name for an old theme. What Mint L is, is the Mint Y legacy theme. So that would be this one here. Go back to the dark. But for me, I would stick with the default because the Mint Y is pretty good. Let me check and see if my accent colors are working correctly. So yeah, let me open up my file manager. So I'm assuming the accent colors are working because I've got pretty much green everywhere. Isn't that what I chose earlier? Let me go back to the settings manager and more system settings is what they call it here. Go back to themes, make sure. Yeah, I chose that accent color. What if I chose purple as an accent color? There we go. New icons, you can see the slider now is purple. The window decorations, the buttons are now purple. So that is very cool. Let me go back to the green. Yeah, I really like that they've got the theming and the accent colors and all of that working nicely on the Debian edition of Linux Mint because I believe that is something that was not quite right in some of the previous versions of Linux Mint Debian Edition. We have Firefox, of course, as our web browser. Let me go ahead and launch Firefox. Let's see which version of Firefox we are on. Obviously, the web browser is the application you're gonna spend most of your time in. It's the most important application, really. And this is Firefox version 117.0.1. You can see Mozilla Firefox for Linux Mint. I guess Linux Mint has its own particular version of Mozilla Firefox that gets packaged for them. And one thing about Mozilla Firefox is the Firefox team of Mozilla actually packages Mozilla Firefox as a snap pack. And that's why Standard Ubuntu defaults to Firefox as a snap is because that is actually how the Mozilla people have decided to package Firefox. It was more convenient for them to just pick one package format for that for Ubuntu instead of maintaining the Debian package version of it and also a snap pack. They just wanted to go with snaps. But there are no snaps, obviously, on Linux Mint. If I do a snap list, you can see the command snap is not found. If you did a where is snapd, snapd is not even installed. Now, obviously, if you wanted to install snapd and enable snaps, you're free to do so on Linux Mint Debian Edition. I do a flat pack list. You can see there are no flat packs installed yet either. But if I did a where is flat pack, flat pack is actually installed. For those of you wondering about pipe wire, let me do a where is pipe wire. See, they're using pipe wire as the audio server. Let's do a uname dash R for the kernel version. They're on 6.1.0. And if I did a apt list space dash dash installed, get a list of all the packages that were installed via the apt package manager, then I'm gonna up arrow and I'm gonna pipe that into wc-l to get a line count. And there are 2,071 packages installed via the apt package manager. Now, let me clear the terminal here. One thing to note, those of you that are already running Linux Mint Debian Edition, maybe you're running LMDE version five and you wanna make the upgrade to LMDE six, you can actually do this. I would back up any important data because these kinds of version to version upgrades sometimes don't work, sometimes things break. So make sure you back up all your data in case it doesn't work. And then you would actually just need to do a fresh install. What you'd wanna do is you would wanna do a sudo apt update to refresh the mirrors. And then you'd wanna do a sudo apt mint upgrade. All one word. And if everything goes right, you should be on LMDE six at that point or all the packages will have been updated to their correct versions at that point. And then after that, what you wanna do is you wanna remove this mint upgrade tool because you won't need it anymore. You would be dangerous to run it again. So do a sudo apt remove mint upgrade. Let me go ahead and close out the terminal. One last thing I'll check. I don't know if they've added any new wallpapers or it's probably the same selection of wallpapers. Yes, so there's the standard Linux Mint collection of wallpapers, which I've seen all of these before. I do like this green one here. It's one of my go-tos. This one here is rather nice too. These are, again, wallpapers you guys have probably seen and then Vanessa, Vera and Victoria. So these were collections from past versions of Linux Mint, by the way. The code name for this version of LMDE is codenamed Faye. I've gotta say here in the Victoria collection, I really like this, our works wallpaper. I think I'm gonna go with that. So that was a quick and cursory look at LMDE six codenamed Faye and LMDE, some people still wonder why Linux Mint maintains the Debian Edition. Why have an Ubuntu-based Linux Mint and a Debian-based Linux Mint? Why maintain the two which are practically the same? Well, a lot of people in the Linux Mint community are a little concerned about basing everything off of Ubuntu because Ubuntu being a corporate distro, maybe they one day decided they're gonna go in some radically different direction that the broader Linux community maybe doesn't want to follow down that same path. Well, you have the Debian Edition, which Debian is a community distribution itself so it would make sense for Linux Mint to maybe eventually migrate all of their ISOs to basing off of Debian rather than Ubuntu. I don't know that may or may not happen one day but right now they're maintaining both editions. I think they see LMDE more as a backup plan. It's a in case of an emergency break glass kind of thing. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Daniel Gabe James met Paul Royal West, Armored Dragon commander, angry George Lee, mythosnader, Rianne Paul, peace archimador, realities for less-rated profit, Roland Solastri, tools devler, warden to an Ubuntu and Willy. These guys, they're my house tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at LMDE 6 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. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys. If you like my work, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace guys.