Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 7 has hit the download mirrors! Here is one at a German university: https://ftp.fau.de/mint/iso/debian/

When I downloaded the ISO image yesterday, it still had beta status. That did not prevent me from installing it on my son's laptop. What follows are first impressions from a mixed father & son perspective.

I switched from MS-DOS straight to GNU/Linux and never used Windows much. My preferred distro is #Debian because it is the universal operating system created by a large, global community. I spend most of my time on the command line.

My son is now ready to give up Windows because support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, and he does not want to upgrade to Windows 11 due to all of the malware it comes with.

He installed and occasionally used Linux Mint (which is based on Ubuntu) on an old computer in the past. As Debian 13 (“trixie”) is quite fresh and also rock-solid, I wanted to give #LMDE another try. Many years ago, my parents used it happily.

LMDE comes with the #Cinnamon desktop which looks a lot like Windows. You can download an official Debian live ISO with Cinnamon pre-installed. I tried it, but it clearly has not been configured quite as lovingly as Linux Mint's. No wonder – Linux Mint developed Cinnamon in the first place.

To my mind, this makes LMDE7 the ideal choice for beginners and pros alike. Installing it (even with full disk encryption) is a breeze – if you give it the entire disk to play with. Try to avoid multi-boot installations if at all possible. If you need Windows later, you can run it in a virtual machine. Be sure to make a complete backup of your Windows system first! We used the free Rescuezilla for this.

So far, we have not run into any issue with LMDE7. OK, there was one gotcha: When configuring automatic backups in Timeshift, do not choose the boot partition as the target. It would fill up very quickly.

#lmde7 #linuxMint #LinuxMintDebianEdition #LinuxMintDebianEdition7 #endOf10