Linux Mint Debian Edition now available in 64-bit, with performance boost

The Linux Mint Debian Edition — built from Debian Testing, unlike "regular" Mint editions that start with an Ubuntu base — just released a new image that pushes the project forward much more quickly that I expected.

With no fancy code name, just Linux Mint Debian (201012), the biggest thing in this new release is the availability of a 64-bit image to go with the original 32-bit offering.

There's some debate about whether or not 32-bit or 64-bit is better on the desktop, and I'm not terribly qualified to definitively state which is better, but on my 64-bit AMD Athlon II dual-core laptop I've been using 64-bit systems exclusively (both Linux and Windows 7, which ships on the Lenovo G555 as 32-bit but which I wiped and reinstalled from the 64-bit Home Premium image).

So for me a 64-bit Linux Mint Debian Edition is welcome.

Other changes/improvements for the 201012 build include (quoting from the Mint Debian 201012 release notes):

• Performance boost (using cgroup, the notorious "4 lines of code better than 200″ in user-space)
  
• Installer improvements (multiple HDDs, grub install on partitions, swap allocation, btrfs support)
  
• Better fonts (Using Ubuntu's libcairo, fontconfig and Ubuntu Font Family) and language support (ttf-wqy-microhei, ttf-sazanami-mincho, ttf-sazanami-gothic installed by default)
  
• Better connectivity and hardware support (pppoe, pppoeconf, gnome-ppp, pppconfig, libgl1-mesa-dri, libgl1-mesa-glx, libgl1-mesa-dev, mesa-utils installed by default)
  
• Better sound support (addressing conflicts between Pulse Audio and Flash)
  
• Updated software and packages

I still haven't seen my No. 1 missing feature from Linux Mint (Debian or otherwise), which is the ability, in the installer, to create either encryted LVM or individual encrypted volumes and/or partitions.

That's how I do it in Debian (I'm running Squeeze, which is still the project's Testing distribution as of this writing). Ubuntu also offers fully encrypted LVM (like Debian) in its alternate installer, and you can encrypt /home in the graphical installer. This is a feature that Mint really needs, in my opinion.

Just because 99.99 percent of Windows and Mac systems aren't encrypted doesn't mean that encryption isn't a good idea (or a great/essential idea for laptops, which are all too easily lost or stolen).