I recently reinstalled Debian on my netbook and was reminded how easy it is to install. The things I had to do that I didn't for Mint when I installed it on my netbook were enable non-free repositories and install firmware-ralink and flashplugin-nonfree. That took about 30 seconds then I could unplug the network cable and use WiFi.
Personally I install Firefox also, but there's no real need to do that it's just a habit of mine to use the nightly build.
For my desktop a Debian install is a similar story but the non-free driver needed is for the nVIDIA graphics which, frankly, doesn't seem to work as I want it (two monitors separate X sessions) on any distro without some messing around so whether I use Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware or Debian it's pretty much the same procedure. Oh, and Gnome refuses to work with separate X session regardless of distro.
I use XFCE on every distro on both my machines and the only distro which seems a little faster is Slackware but that might be my imagination. Certainly Debian isn't any different day-to-day than Mint.

Debian is more reliable/stress-free once you got everything setup to your needs. Initial setup takes a bit longer but then it'll leave you in peace & just work as expected.

Just curious, any idea how KDE will "work" in Mint as compared to Debian
- I mean the level of configuration needed.

I want to thank everyone for their input. I think I'll give Debian a try... when I have a free afternoon to set everything up properly (might be a while though).

I tried linuxmint cinnamon & in VBox it seems quite user friendly there were a few glitches but it worked.
Firefox was pre-installed, flash, network was there.
Java not installed though.
Definately a better beginners distro than Ubuntu.

Just incase you are not aware, there are two versions of Mint. One is Ubuntu based and has girls names and the other is Debian based (on testing) and is called LMDE. I have used both after using (and testing development versions of) Ubuntu. Mint is clean and as already pointed out it does just work. However having used all 4 OSs on machines varying from old Pentium 4, Celerons, AMD64, and Intel 64 bit Pentiums, I personally feel Debian is slightly faster and uses less RAM even before I cut alot of the fat out of it (which btw is much easier in Debian than it is with Ubuntu or Mint).

My other issue with Mint is it holds your hand, actually I'll go so far as to say it is starting to dictate, to much. If I ever use LMDE again I wouldn't use the native Mint repositories instead I'd make sure it was pointing to Debian instead.

I just made room on my laptop to test Lmde Cinnamon & I was surprised that even the wireless works out the box atleast the ath5k.
Definately user friendly. I didn't check to see what the startup messages were though.

I know regular Mint is based off of Ubuntu, while Mint Debian Edition is basically Debian Ubuntu-ized. I tried LMDE on my laptop. It was fine until I tried updating packages. All of the Mint specific packages broke, while the regular Debian packages updated just fine.

I'm a Debian fan myself, just trying to make it easier on the people that I help installing it for.

I use Debian 6, 7, Jessie and Sid all with the xfce DE.

Switched from Ubuntu to Debian.

There is little on modern hardware that will make Debian faster than Ubuntu and so I assume with Mint.

Your install will be slightly smaller.

You may well need to install the package "firmware-linux-nonfree" to get every thing to work. With Debian 6 it was needed to boot to a desktop at all on my box. Debian 7 will boot but will not detect my monitor correctly so the resolution is off.

To do that if you install and can't get to the desktop you will have to use nano to edit the sources.list and then run an update/upgrade cycle and install the package.

I get better results using the FOSS drivers provided by xserver-xorg for my 6400 series Radeon video card.

If you install with the Debian install DVD you should get VLC installed so video playback should work pretty well OTB.

LMDE is not basically Debian Ubuntu-ized, it is Debian with Mint packages added to it. Debian (LMDE) and Ubuntu are not binarily compatible so LMDE is not Ubuntu-ized.

I say it's Ubuntu-ized because LMDE behaves like an Ubuntu system (ie sudo this, sudo that, no root user, etc...). I never said LMDE uses Ubuntu packages. It's true that Debian and Ubuntu are largely incompatible. I have on occasion used Ubuntu packages on my Debian install without issue.

When I installed Lmde I elected not to install grub so I ran update-grub from my Debian system & it recognized it but put 4 entries all of them the same for Lmde.

I have the 64 and 32 bit versions of LMDE on my loaner usb drive. I think is is better for noobs than Ubuntu.

The way they are providing a stable snapshot of Debian Testing is, I think, a much better way of dealing with testing than the Ubuntu method in
their LTS versions.

It at least allows you to switch to Debian repos and try the real thing.

That said I think they have the OS under too much control for a real Linux distro. Would never switch to it from Debian for my self.

This is the reason that I have Debian Xfce on that drive also. Folks can make up their own mind what they like.

Debian is not anywhere near as difficult to deal with as the FUD, primarily put out on the UFS indicates.

I ran Ubuntu as my main OS for years. Debian 5 (Lenny) was my first multi boot distro a whole month after installing Ubuntu as my first Linux install. Lenny was not problem for me to set up at that time.

Debian since the release of 6 (Squeeze) has been no harder to set up than Ubuntu if you know how to set up your sources.list and that is taken care of by the fine sticky here on this forum.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...e-list-330913/

Hell, it was all I needed to set up Lenny as a very green noob.

Don't forget the experimental repo, that sometimes contains a more up to date kernel as well - although it seemed to skip over 3.9 and has 3.10-rc available.