Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Linux Mint is a desktop environment. Why don't they build this desktop for Debian (or Ubuntu, or some other entity with the infrastructure already in place)?

Building a top notch modern desktop environment and compete with Gnome and KDE (let alone Windows and Mac) is hard enough. I can not for the life of me understand why you would also take upon yourself to build out a fully fledged Linux distribution on top of that. The odds that both of these ventues would be successful seems faint.

The last part of my comment was meant to say that if you for some inexplicable reason still wanted to go down that road, a Debian spin is still a thousand times easier than re-inventing everything yourself. Because the latter must be what Mint set out to do, otherwise they would not have ended up with the situation they are in. It must close to impossible to maintain, and it can't possibly be anyone's idea of "fun".

Note: you can avoid this step in the future by logging into your LWN account.