Hi Matt,It's not a switch. It's an addition. We offer many editions. One of them is based on Debian Testing. All others are still based on Ubuntu's latest.
There are many reasons:- We're all hobbyists at heart and we could do it, so it was only a matter of time before we just did it really :)) Personally I want to do it with Slackware and have an LFS version as well... but that's just for me, it won't go public. - We like to experiment with different components and see how it affects our OS. The same way KDE features pros and cons when compared to Gnome, Debian does when compared to Ubuntu. In order to chose what's best, we need to know what choices we have and what pros and cons they represent. - Although there's no plan for us to develop our own package base at the moment, this is something we're interested in knowing more about in the future. Experimenting with package bases gives us more insight in this and tells us more about the portability of our technology. - We wanted to bring more choice to people. Some people don't like Gnome and so we give them KDE. Some people can't run Mint 9 because of the hardware support, and so we give them the same desktop on top of a different base.
- The rolling aspect. - The speed and performance gains. - There was a huge demand for it.- Finally we also wanted to be more in control of our own OS. We offer derivative distributions, but as a project, we consider ourselves an OS. Our goal isn't to improve, modify or tweak Ubuntu, though this is what we do in practice of course. Our goal is to design what we envision as the best desktop OS possible. We're limited in our design by upstream choices made by Ubuntu, Linux, Gnome, Debian, etc.. and as much as possible, when it's important to us, we want to gain more control and have a greater impact on where things are going. A vast majority of changes coming from upstream are beneficial to us and to Linux users, but some aren't. Of course we're not planning to design our own window-manager/desktop, and package base, this isn't what we're talking about, but by experimenting with alternatives we're giving ourselves more independence towards upstream projects, so this is quite important. Whether it's plymouth, GDM, the CTRL+ALT+Backspace change... there has been time where we didn't feel in control of things and we found ourselves stuck in a position where we just had to follow. Our impact on the overall Linux desktop isn't as big as upstream projects such as Ubuntu or Gnome of course, so we humbly accept these things and support them towards our users... still, it's a reason for us to do some R&D and seek solutions to give us more choices and options in the future.
Regards, Clement Lefebvre Linux Mint On 17/09/10 13:49, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 11:41:03AM +0100, Clement Lefebvre wrote:Before we talk about anything else, I would like to thank you and the Debian project for providing such a wonderful base. It's been the case since 2006, when we started using Debian via Ubuntu, and it's now clearer than ever with our newly released LMDE based directly on Debian Testing.Thanks for joining us here. I'm curious about the motivation for the switch: was it primarily your desire to have a rolling release model? What other considerations were there?