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You do realize, I hope, that Ubuntu is Debian based,
Mint based upon Ubuntu takes advantage of some customizations made to Ubunto by Canonical. Which you like depends in part upon how well you agree with the Canonical choices and philosophy. Personally, I prefer pure Debian over Ubuntu or Mint, though I recommend Ubuntu and Mint (with no particular preference) for people who do not understand or care about the features of the underlying OS software.
The people I advise care far more about business capability than drivers for game compliant video or wireless connectivity. The environment is home or corporate office.
Can you refine your question slightly? What would this particular 'newbie' be wanting Linux for? How do they use a computer, and what is their highest priority (other than that it 'just work'?
Distribution: Debian Wheezy, Jessie, Sid/Experimental, playing with LFS.
Posts: 2,900
Rep:
Having used both extensively I'd say Mint Debian as long as the sources.list is changed to Stable or Squeeze. Many LMDE users have done this anyway so it's not an issue. Ubuntu appears noob friendly but they add so much to it that it uses way to much of the PCs resources.
Thought I'd post back to say that I've given Linux Mint 11 Xfce (Debian-based) a spin on a spare partition for a couple of weeks to see how it compared with Julia. I have to say that it was faster (as expected) but came with a few bugs and broke after an update screwed up GRUB.
As stated by snowpine, it is a rolling release based on Debian Testing. Updates are frequent and the potential for things to go wrong is higher than with a stable release. On that basis and from my experience, I also wouldn't recommend Mint Debian to a beginner.
I have now deleted the Xfce Debian version and will stick with the superb main distro (I would recommend to anybody).
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