Linux Mint has released the beta for LMDE 7, codenamed Gigi. The project’s goal is to ensure Linux Mint’s user experience can be maintained even if Ubuntu, on which Linux Mint is usually based, were to become unavailable. LMDE also serves as a development target to ensure the software built by the team is compatible outside of the Ubuntu base. As it’s not based on Ubuntu, LMDE uses the package base provided by Debian.
The Linux Mint team is encouraging users to try out the LMDE 7 beta on a spare device or virtual machine and report any bugs they encounter on GitHub. If you do find anything wrong, the Linux Mint team asks that you be as accurate as possible and include all information that helps developers reproduce the issue, mentioning whether the bug happens always or sometimes.
The developers won’t have time to respond to every report, and some issues may not be fixed, but the beta phase is designed to be a bug-squashing rush so that developers will be extremely busy.
Next month will see the end of Windows 10 support, and if you’re running a computer incapable of running Windows 11, then running Linux is one option you can take. If you’re interested in LMDE 7, you may like the fact that LMDE 7 maintains modest system requirements to run. According to the Mint team, you need a minimum of 2GB of RAM (4GB recommended), 20GB of disk space (100GB recommended, and a 1024x768 resolution display.
If you do decide to try out the beta, you won’t have to do a clean install of the final stable release; just apply any updates that are available, and you’ll be considered to be on the stable version once it’s out.
Judging by the community’s responses in the announcement blog post, users seem to be excited for the upcoming release, with one calling LMDE the best Mint version available. Another user said they’ve installed it on four computers and haven’t experienced any problems so far, meaning it could be quite stable already.
LMDE 7 is based on Debian 13, which will receive extended support until 30 June 2030, so it should be supported until this date too. You can download it here now.