Linux Mint's purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution.

Is Linux Mint suitable for companies?

Yes. Linux Mint offers paid commercial support to companies and individuals. Free community support is also available from the forums and the IRC channel. The main purpose of Linux Mint is to innovate and constantly bring the best desktop solutions to its users. For this reason, the release cycle is fast and a new version of Linux Mint can be released every month or every two months. All released versions of Linux Mint are actively supported and some of the releases (possibly Bianca or Cassandra) will come with a Long Term Support guarantee (a guarantee that our Support Center will support these releases for the years to come).

Is Linux Mint suitable for individuals?

Yes, definitely. We believe Linux is the best operating system on the market. There are more than 300 active Linux distributions and we're working hard at becoming the best alternative for your desktop. This is a tough competition as there are other great desktop operating systems and distributions out there. We have faith in the quality of our desktop and a lot of great ideas. If your computer is a PC and you have more than 512MB RAM you should try Linux Mint and see what you think about it. If you're running a 5 years old non-free operating system such as Microsoft Windows XP you should definitely be impressed. We like hearing about your experience and taking your suggestions onboard so please give us your feedback.

Why is there a Light Edition and a Full Edition?

Linux Mint respects the GPL and it also respects the copyrights and licenses of the proprietary software it distributes. However it uses technologies that have been patented in some parts of the World. Most countries do not recognize the legitimacy of software patents so for most of our users this is not a problem. But if you're unlucky and you live in a country where software patents are legally enforcable, you need a version of Linux Mint which is free of patented technologies, and this is what the Light Edition is about.

The purpose of the Light Edition is to bring a version of Linux Mint which doesn't contain:

· Proprietary software
· Patented technologies
· Support for restricted formats

In some countries where the legislation allows software patents to be enforced distributors can be exposed to potential patent threats. The Light Edition provides a safer way to distribute Linux Mint by removing patent-encumbered components.

The following components are not present in the Light Edition:

· Macromedia Flash
· Support for encrypted DVDs
· Windows codecs
· Support for restricted multimedia formats
· Unrar
· Sun Java (replaced by GIJ)

The Light Edition also comes with Grub, as opposed to Grub-GFX which comes with the Main Edition.

This edition includes all other technologies from Elyssa.