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Review: Linux Mint Debian Edition 7
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
Linux Mint is a rare gem in the open source community. It is a project which consistently puts out quality, polished, well designed releases. The in-house applications, the Cinnamon desktop, the update manager, and tools like the LMDE installer are all well put together. Mint is a project which is friendly to beginners while also being flexible and powerful enough for expert users. It makes computing easy without getting in the way and I am regularly impressed by the quality of software coming out of the Mint project.
Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 is no exception to this tradition. The project finds a good balance between being friendly without being distracting, being polished without being too flashy, providing good tools without overloading the application menu, and (as always) sane defaults have been chosen. It was difficult to find any faults with the latest release from the Mint team. The system installer should, in my opinion, default to using Btrfs in order to leverage filesystem snapshots (which would work well with Timeshift). This isn't a bug, but I think it is a missed opportunity.
The Cinnamon desktop is one of the better Linux desktops available these days and, even with the "experimental" Wayland session, Cinnamon performed well. The only bug I encountered this week was Celluloid not displaying videos in the Wayland session. Though I feel it only fair to point out both Celluloid and Totem have this same issue in GNOME and Plasma Wayland sessions too and the player works properly in Mint's default X11 session.
In short: this is another excellent release from the Mint team. LMDE 7 is a distribution I would feel equally comfortable installing on my non-technological family members' computers and on my own.