Among the hundreds of Linux distributions available, there are only a few dozen (or less) that are really popular. Among them we have Linux Mint, an Ubuntu-based operating system that gained popularity for its Cinnamon graphical environment. But Clement Lefebvre also puts at our disposal another distribution, one based directly on Debian that a few hours ago he released LMDE 4, codenamed Debbie. For anyone wondering, the above are short for Linux Mint Debian Edition.
As we read in the release note, LMDE 4 has arrived with some interesting news, but the one that is perhaps most striking, although it was expected, is that it has become based on Debian 10 Buster. On the other hand, it has received some improvements that are also included in Linux Mint 19.3 and that we will detail after the cut.
Highlights of LMDE 4
- Automated partitioning with support for LVM and full disk encryption.
- Home directory encryption.
- Support for automated installation of NVIDIA drivers.
- NVMe support.
- Renewed installer.
- Secure boot support.
- Btrfs subvolumes support.
- Automatic installation of microcode packages.
- Automatic resolution increase for the live session to a minimum of 1024 × 768 in Virtualbox.
- Improvements of Linux Mint 19.3 (HDT, Boot Repair, System Reports, Language Settings, HiDPI and Layout Improvements, New Boot Menus, Cellulooid, Gnote, Drawing, Cinnamon 4.4, XApp Status Icons, etc.).
- APT recommendations enabled by default.
- Deb-multimedia packages and repositories have been removed.
- Debian 10 Buster base package with backports repository.
How to upgrade from LMDE 3
To update (more detailed tutorial in your official website) from LMDE 3, we have to do the following:
- We open the update manager and apply all the updates that are available.
- We make a backup of the most important files.
- We remove the deb-multimedia.org repository since it will not be used in LMDE 4. With this we will also avoid conflicts. To do this, we open the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-packages-repositories.list as superuser (root), we remove the line deb https://www.deb-multimedia.org stretch main non-free, we save the file and update the apt repositories (sudo apt udate).
- We download all the multimedia packages from the software sources tool.
- We remove the remaining multimedia packages.
- We update with the command apt install mint upgrade.
- Finally, we write the command mintupgradedownload to download the new packages.
You can download the LMDE 4 from the link in the release note. If you try it, feel free to leave your experiences in the comments.