Mint (number versions) is based on Ubuntu. LMDE is based on Debian Testing and regardless of fanboy speak LMDE is NOT a noobie distro. If Debian Testing breaks, which Debian admits can happen for weeks at a time, what does a noob do? nothing but wonder what they have done wrong.

Regular Mint is just Ubuntu with some fancy stuff and it suffers from the exact same issues Ubuntu does.

My advice is go with Ubuntu 10.10, it is stable (relatively), or 10.04.2 (it is now a pretty good distro). If and or when you feel adventurous try Debian Squeeze which is similar in specification to Ubuntu 10.04 and is much more stable.

Oh OK, I had forgotten that Mint is now based on Debian and Ubuntu. (They made that switch a while back). Thanks for pointing that out.
I wonder how that works exactly. I wonder what exactly they take from Debian, and what they take from Ubuntu.
I do check the newbie and Ubuntu sections frequently. I think that perhaps more beginners try Ubuntu than Mint. So that may be why there are more threads on the newbie section about Ubuntu. If Mint is now more Debian than Ubuntu, that would likely make it more stable though.
I have also been using Ubuntu for almost 6 years now, so I have learned how to handle Ubuntu's little idiosyncrasies.

I wrote my last post before I read your post.
You are right. Thanks for clearing this up. A quick check of the Mint download page confirms this: http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
They have a Linux Mint 10 (presumably based on Ubuntu), and a Linux Mint Debian (which is a rolling release distro based on Debian testing)
http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
A rolling release distro would likely not less beginner friendly than a fixed release distro.

That's fine just trying to help ;)

I've used Ubuntu (even tested a few of the development releases) and LMDE as well. It was LMDE that convinced me to use Debian.

LMDE is a very nice distro but then again so is Ubuntu.

With regards to using regular Mint I do not see the sense in using a fork of a fork, it just adds an extra layer of possible problems. If LMDE was based on Squeeze and not Testing (currently Wheezy) I'd say go for it. If you really want a Mint type Debian use Squeeze and add the LMDE repository. I posted the details of how to do that in this post.