In our Linux Distro Reviews series, Linux Mint and LMDE 6 scored our highest ratings and remain our most recommended distros for newcomers and experienced users alike. But which of the two should you choose?

A Brief History of Linux Mint

For good reason, Linux Mint is one of the most popular Linux distros. Based on Ubuntu, Mint benefits from Canonical’s work to make Ubuntu the most widely used distro on the market, including industry-leading hardware support and wide application compatibility.

At the same time, Mint avoids some of Canonical’s more controversial decisions, such as integrating Snaps. Snaps are Canonical’s universal package format and compete with Flatpaks. Due to early performance issues, which have largely been solved, and the fact that the backend Snap Store is proprietary, Snaps have not enjoyed the widespread adoption that Flatpak has and are mainly used within the Ubuntu ecosystem.

In addition, Mint’s default desktop environment (DE) is Cinnamon—which the Mint team develops—with Xfce and Mate also being offered. All three DEs offer a traditional computing experience, akin to Windows 7. This is in contrast to Ubuntu’s GNOME DE, which offers a more modern take on the computing interface.

Because Linux Mint is based on the Ubuntu LTS version, each release includes five years of support.

Where LMDE Fits In

LMDE, which stands for Linux Mint Debian Edition, is Linux Mint based on Debian instead of Ubuntu. Why does Linux Mint maintain two different versions of the distro? There are two main reasons:

• The Mint team recognizes that Ubuntu’s decisions and priorities don’t always align with its own. They also realize the time may come when Ubuntu’s decisions make it impossible to continue using it as a base for Linux Mint. If, again if—that ever happens, LMDE provides a viable fallback option for the Mint team.
• Because the Mint team develops the Cinnamon desktop, along with an entire suite of apps, maintaining LMDE provides a opportunity to test the DE and apps on another base. This helps ensure that everything works well outside of Linux Mint, since Cinnamon and the various apps are often available in the repos of other distros.

What LMDE Lacks

Despite having near feature parity with the mainline Mint, LMDE still lacks some significant features:

• LMDE does not have Mint’s Driver Manager tool, which makes it easy to install third-party drivers for some hardware, such as Nvidia GPUs. This tool is based on the Ubuntu Additional Drivers tool, meaning there is no direct equivalent in LMDE.

• Kernel management is another area where mainline Mint still has an advantage. Mainline Mint provides a GUI tool to select from a range of available kernels. In contrast, LMDE users must either use the Terminal or Synaptic, neither of which is as easy as Mint’s kernel management, especially for new users.

• Ubuntu’s Hardware Enablement (HWE) stack is another advantage of mainline Mint. Ubuntu routinely brings newer kernels and Mesa graphics drivers to its LTS version, both of which often bring performance and stability improvements.

It’s true that Debian has the ability to install newer kernels and some apps via its Backports repository, which are packages “taken from the next Debian release, adjusted and recompiled for usage on Debian stable. Unfortunately, Backports are not supported by the Debian Security Team to the same degree as packages in the Stable Repo. As a result, while the risk may be minimal, there is an undeniable risk associated with running Backports packages. In addition, while Debian 12 Bookworm has seen two Mesa updates come through Backports, this was the first time in a number of years that anyone had backported Mesa, due to the complexity of the package and the difficulty in backporting it.

In contrast, Ubuntu’s HWE kernels and Mesa updates are fully supported by the company’s security teams, meaning there is no added risk in running them.

These differences may not matter to many users, but they do exist.

Will Mint Mainline LMDE?

On the Mint forums, Reddit, and YouTube, there is a vocal minority of users who believe Mint should dump the Ubuntu base and make LMDE the mainline edition.

While it is certainly possible that Ubuntu’s decisions may force that outcome at some point in the future, project lead Clément (Clem) Lefèbvre has made clear the team’s intention to stick with the Ubuntu base for the foreseeable future.

I’ve nothing bad to say about 22.04. I hope Ubuntu continues to be as good going forward and doesn’t neglect its APT package base. If we don’t have a reason to transition we won’t. Ubuntu is still the best APT package base out there in our opinion. LMDE is there as a potential solution, but it is not a goal in itself.

Despite Canonical converting more packages from DEBs to Snaps in Ubuntu, Clem has also voiced his belief that the Canonical will eventually be forced to abandon Snap, or at least scale it back because it has largely failed to gain any traction outside of Ubuntu.

Again, a switch to LMDE as the mainline version of Mint may happen at some point down the road, but Clem and the other developers have yet to see that day as a likely possibility.

My Own Experience

I ran LMDE as my daily driver on both of my computers for roughly a year and a half, switching to it shortly after the release of LMDE 6. For the most part, especially on my Linux-first Tuxedo laptop, the experience was flawless.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for my 2019 HP 14-inch Pavilion. The machine would freeze and crash when trying to put it to sleep. The screen would go black, making it look as if it was asleep, but it would refuse to come back on. What’s more, based on fan noise and battery drain, it quickly became obvious that the machine wasn’t fully asleep, but had simply turned the screen off and/or only partially went to sleep.

As a result, it was not uncommon for me to close the lid and set the computer aside, only to come back a couple of hours later and find the computer had completely shut off once its battery drained. Even if that didn’t happen, I was unable to get the screen to come back on, forcing me to hard reboot the machine. Obviously, both potential outcomes could and did result in data loss.

To make things more interesting, the likelihood of the crash happening increased the longer the machine was running. A day or two of uptime and it was unlikely to occur. But after four or five days of uptime, crashing on sleep became a near certainty.

After doing everything I could think of and read about to troubleshoot the problem, I finally switched back to mainline Ubuntu-based Mint…and the problem completely disappeared. There’s a couple of interesting factors to consider.

• The HP laptop has a problematic Realtek Wi-Fi card that appears to be linked to the sleep issue. What’s more, HP dropped s3idle support from its laptops, in favor of s2idle only. This could also be part of the problem.
• At the point I switched from LMDE back to mainline Mint, I was running a newer Linux kernel on LMDE than is available on mainline Mint. Via Backports, I was running the 6.12 series of kernel, whereas mainline Mint 22.1 is still on the 6.11 series. As a result, it’s safe to that simply upgrading to a newer kernel would not fix the issue, since LMDE was already running a newer kernel.

Canonical is well-known for its hardware compatibility, often working with manufacturers to make sure Ubuntu supports specific hardware. This is one of the reasons why Ubuntu has its own customized Linux kernel, as opposed to simply using the generic Linux kernel.

In my case, that hardware compatibility provided a tangible benefit, as my HP has now been running mainline Mint for over a month without a single sleep-induced crash.

My Recommendation

As I stated in our initial Linux Mint vs LMDE comparison, there are valid reasons to choose LMDE over mainline Mint, including less frequent updates, already being embedded in the Debian ecosystem, and preferring a distro that is fully based on community roots, as opposed to Mint being a community distro based on a corporate distro.

Nonetheless, there is no denying that mainline Mint has tangible benefits over LMDE, especially in some situation, largely as a result of its Ubuntu base.

For me personally, LMDE remains my favorite version of Linux Mint, and my favorite Linux distro of the many I have tried and experimented with. Nonetheless, I have switched both of my machines to mainline Mint and plan to stay here for the foreseeable future, mainly as a result of mainline Mint making my HP consistently reliable once again.

When LMDE 7 comes out, we’ll be sure to do another review comparing the two. For now, however, the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint continues to deserve its status as the main focus of the Mint team.