The first major update of Linux Mint Debian edition was released on March 2, 2014. I downloaded both Cinnamon and Mate versions (remember that SolydXK now releases the KDE & XFCE versions) and tried both of the versions for about a week to pen this review. I like the fact that Mint took a decision to roll out a Debian spin in 2010 and is still pursuing the same with it's preferred desktop environments, Cinnamon and Mate. The Debian versions look and feel identical to the Linux Mint Ubuntu versions - in my review I present a comparison in performance across the Ubuntu and Debian versions which many readers might be interested to see.
Mint Debian spin is based on Debian testing and hence, has a semi-rolling release with important updates coming out periodically. Debian testing has the advantage of more updated applications than the stable release ("Wheezy" now) and hence, preferable to users like me. Further, the present version of Mint Debian provides support to EFI and GPT, required to install Linux on modern systems with Windows 8. I downloaded both the 64-bit Cinnamon and Mate versions for this review.
Linux Mint Debian 201403 Cinnamon ships with Cinnamon 2.0.14 and Linux kernel 3.11.2. For the Mate version, desktop environment is Mate 1.6.1. I created live USB using Mint USB Image writer and then installed both the distros on separate 50 GB partitions of my Asus K55VM laptop with 2.3 Ghz Core i7 3rd gen processor, 8 GB DDR3 RAM and 2 GB Nvidia GeForce 630M graphics. The system had Ubuntu 14.04 GNOME beta1 installed in one of the partitions.
