The post says as much. Don’t discount the immense value of that eye candy, not to mention the crucial aspect of great usable defaults and a system that works excellently out of the box for a layman user. Debian alone does not pull that weight. Cinnamon is the easy to spot differential, sure, but LM does a lot more to maintain a really good user experience that you can just install and use painlessly.

An example that comes to mind of the extra effort LM goes to, is that they removed and blocked snap from their Ubuntu-based flavours (i.e. the main one). They point it out in the Release Notes for each release, and link to an explanation of the reasoning behind it (it’s good reasons) and, if you still want to enable it for some reason, instructions to do so.

Mint also has its own tools that reduce or eliminate dependence on terminal interaction.

My interpretation is that Linux Mint does a lot under the surface to maintain an excellent general-purpose distro that anyone can pick up and use.

Edit: even in your meme post, the yacht provides all of the amenities that make the trip a tolerable and enjoyable experience, which the truck doesn’t even try to compete with… So we might be in agreement!

lol yes

Forked distros be like that, yes) however idea of forked distros is to have preset defaults that cater to certain groups of people, basically to have less hassle you choose fork to your liking and just do “flash and go” without much customizing

Dang ಥ_ಥ

ಠᴗಠ

Is the problem of outdated packages still a thing now that you can get them all via Flatpacks?

Concerning the kernel, again, can you always benefit from the latest one? Personally I am starting to appreciate not having to constantly update the OS while at the same time enjoying the latest software. Concerning apt packages, those in the Debian repo will just work like clockwork

Isn’t that one of the benefits of LMDE? I think that the DE related packages and maybe things like browsers get updated more often.

For applications these days, there is Flatpak for anything you want to keep more current.

Sure a lot of the rest of the distro will get old. Does that really matter to most users though? If the DE is up to date, the system will feel current. If your key apps are up to date, you are productive. An up to date browser keeps the web working well ( perhaps the main criteria for most people these days). Having the rest of the system be stable could be a good thing.

Devs would probably want more up to date versions of some things. Most regular users are probably just fine though.

Debian backports kernel can be used, it is pretty up to date.

In LMDE they continue to update the DE, that is one of the benefits of using it over stock Debian + Cinnamon or SpiralLinux. Most but not all other packages follow Debian stable. Regular Mint has similar experiences with old packages since they use Ubuntu LTS.

You might be interested in Nitrux, it’s an immutable distro based on Debian Unstable and the latest Liquorix kernel. If has the most recent but stable Mesa, pipewire and other drivers, but most of the userland packages are pulled from Ubuntu LTS (IIRC) - so it’s an interesting mix of having the latest base that makes it compatible with newer hardware, but has a stable userland without any of the issues that you’d see from normal packages on Debian Unstable.

What even is modern hardware? If your hardware is more than 2 years old you a never going to have a problem.

I’m ok with that for how I use Debian, and is its kind of intended purpose. Outdated but stable is fine for a server being that the latter is my main concern. I wouldn’t use it for my daily driver (tried that and wound up back in Windows). IMHO, Debian has no GUI.

Can’t you pick it up from Synaptic?