The past until now (skip to the next section if you don't want to hear about my background with my current distro- thought it may help with advice about LMDE). ---- I've been with Arch Linux consistently since 2003. I love that has been minimal and customizable, bleeding edge and fun to toy with, but most importantly rolling updates. Anyway, fast forward to 2012. Arch starts making changes to it's core big time, which is fine, but I've come to realize I'm spending more and more time over the past couple of years adapting to big, often user unfriendly changes on my system than working with the community on packaging and support, which I'd rather do. User unfriendliness is nice to a degree, I love the control I have, and occasionally being forced to learn new things about Linux (or not have a Linux OS to boot until I have time). But, as I work more professionally, invest more time in family life personally, I find it annoying I have to invest unexpected time to fix things on my 3+ year old install of Arch with updates and new big changes (yes, I know, a bit of a rolling updates contradiction). I've toyed with the idea of a fresh install of Arch, but I remind myself that I use Mate desktop (went from minimal desktops and settled with a customized version of Gnome2 - now Mate). My pursuit of investigating bugs and helping developers (of which I am mostly not myself) is falling on mostly deaf ears in the Arch Linux community for Mate; probably because most Archers use awesome, Gnome3, or Cinnamon. LMDE (Debian Mint)? ---- I've read some of the discussion about a couple Lugers using LMDE, with positive feedback on it over the past couple of years. I've been playing with Mint live iso virtualized a bit. Obviously, everything is done for the user, which I don't love, but I know I can get under hood on my own terms and tweak to some extent. Then I found LMDE. Rolling releases? Community support? Cinnamon and Mate standard- feels and sounds good to me! I also like that a lot of my professional tools I use for security and forensics are available in deb packages and I probably won't be compiling packages nearly as much as I do with Arch. My questions for LMDE users: * If you're a more advanced linux user, what don't you like about it? * How is the community for support and bug fixing? * How does it compare to my near decade experience (I realize I gave a brief synopsis of this) with Arch Linux? * Are there custom kernel options that are pre-compiled (for example, I use a pre-compiled Intel -ck package for Arch; have not had time for custom patching / compiling kernels for about two years now)? * I noticed some of the packages are a couple weeks behind compared to Arch repos (for example, Firefox). Is this because more testing is involved before releasing updates as stable? Thanks for any insight! -- Jeremy MountainJohnson jeremy.mountainjohnson at gmail.com