In a rather discreet manner, with just a small paragraph at the end of their monthly newsletter, the Linux Mint team has announced that they will stop basing their Linux Mint Debian Edition on the Testing branch of Debian and move it to Stable.
Let's remember that one of the main attractions of this flavor of Linux Mint was the rolling release -like development cycle that came from being based on Debian Testing , which eliminated the need for periodic reinstalls to move to the next version and allowed it to have more up-to-date packages than those found in Debian Stable (in theory, since in reality it was always the most abandoned of the Mint versions ).
Linux Mint has not clarified the reasons for making this change, simply stating that the transition from the current LMDE Update Pack 8 to the Debian Jessie packages will be gradual, similar to any other Update Pack, and that it will be in sync with the development of Debian Jessie and its planned freeze for November of this year.
We'll see what changes this base change brings to LMDE , although for now those who liked this distro for its rolling features will have to look for another option.
UPDATE : According to the Linux Mint forum , this decision is the result of lengthy deliberations that began with the announcement that, starting with Linux Mint 17 , all future versions of the main Linux Mint branch would be based on Ubuntu 's LTS releases . The goal in both cases is to concentrate the development team's efforts on a few long-term support releases instead of spreading them across a large number of releases that are quickly abandoned.
They say that thanks to this, "the two distributions will be more similar to each other. LMDE will gain in quality and attention to detail while requiring less maintenance . "
Furthermore, from now on, software updates that are not found in the Debian Stable repositories (and in the Ubuntu 14.04 repositories in the case of the main branch) will still arrive in LMDE in the form of backports, so users of the distro will not have to settle for packages as old as those in the regular Debian Stable repositories.