The first edition of LMDE will be supported for a while

May 27, 2015 11:31 GMT  ·  By

The first edition of Linux Mint Debian will reach EOL status (end of life) in January, 2016, and users have been advised to upgrade their systems as soon as possible.

Linux Mint Debian is just another member of the Linux Mint family, but it's based on Debian (as the name suggests) and not on Ubuntu, like the rest of them. The Linux Mint developers have been working on the Debian edition for some time, but it's still not as widely used as the regular flavor. That doesn't mean that the devs have given up on it. In fact, they are probably working twice as hard now for the second edition.

LMDE or Linux Mint Debian is based on the Debian Testing branch, and the developers say that it's faster than the one based on Ubuntu, but it has a few drawbacks. For one, the distro doesn't have PPA support. Also, numerous updates are pushed all the time, which are actually tested snapshots from the Debian branch. It's not the ideal way of doing things, but it seems to work for this particular distro.

Linux Mint Debian to reach end of life on January 1, 2016.

End of life just means that the operating system will no longer receive security updates, and it's basically abandoned by the developers. It doesn't mean that you can't use it past that date, just that it won't be as secure as before. This is a Linux system after all.

"The first release of Linux Mint Debian, i.e. LMDE 1 “debian”, will reach End Of Life on January 1st 2016. If you are using LMDE 1, please upgrade to LMDE 2 “Betsy”. Alternatively, you can switch to the following long term support releases, via a fresh installation. Linux Mint 13 'Maya' is supported until 2017 and Linux Mint 17 'Qiana' or 17.1 'Rebecca', supported until 2019," noted Clement Levebvre on the official blog.

In the meantime, you can download Linux Mint Debian 2 from Softpedia and give it a spin.