• I may actually give this a go.

    With the addition of non-free firmware in Debian ( so better hardware compatibility ) and the rising popularity of Flatpak and Distrobox ( so access to newer software ), the advantages of Ubuntu are narrowing and the problems with Ubuntu continue to mount. Basing something like Mint directly on Debian makes sense to me.

    I have been considering trying Debian with Distrobox / Arch to fill any application gaps. LMDE might fill that void instead.

    • I use Debian and was using Arch in a Distrobox to have some AUR apps (PyCharm, DBeaver, Pulsar Editor and a few more). It’s nice and I recomend you to try and have fun with it. Undoubtedly, Distrobox is a game changer - however, I believe it’s a better tool to set a development environment, with the distro and packages used in the production environment. Nowadays, just to install random software on Debian, I’ve been using Pacstall - try it as well. In the end, I think it integrates better. For example, if I click on a link in a Markdown doc in Pulsar in a box, either it will not open the link if I don’t have another browser within the box or I’ll have to implement a workaround to open the host’s browser.