LMDE is a rolling release, using Debian's Testing repository; the installation disk is just a snapshot. Some (including Mint) say that a rolling release is not suitable for beginners, but Debian's Testing is better than some distro's stable: the software on these disks ran from the CLI without any scary warnings.

The main programs are LibreOffice, Gimp, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Xchat, Banshee, Gnome-mplayer, Totem, and VLC. Codecs and flash are pre-installed.

One disk provides both Gnome 3 with the Cinnamon shell and Maté. I couldn't test Gnome because my hardware won't run it. Normally Gnome defaults to its fallback mode, but that is not supplied here. Maté can now be regarded as a finished product, as good as any other desktop. It's surprisingly small: you could just about get by in 256MB. For some reason, the Gnome configuration tool is installed, but the Maté one has to be downloaded.

The other version has Xfce, and works equally well. This is actually larger than Maté, needing 512MB.

Problems

The biggest fault is the installer, which is no longer the Ubuntu one. It has no facility for encryption, which is vital for laptops; without it, if the computer is stolen, your identity may be too.

The other problem was that I could not get it to use my USB speakers. The Multimedia Systems Selector doesn't work and ~/.asoundrc is ignored. This is basically a Debian problem, which seems to occur in most derivatives.

A minor fault is that Mint doesn't put a pager on the panel. Workspaces are one of the advantages of Linux, but how can the Windows refugee learn about them if they are hidden away?