Linux Mint was first introduced in 2006, and since then has been transformed over 13 releases. Mint comes in 2 main types, Linux Mint and Linux Mint Debian Edition. Linux Mint is based on and is fully compatible with Ubuntu, the Debian Edition as the name suggests is based on Debian.
There are two Linux Mint release updates per year, each release is given a version number and code name, the code name uses a female first name ending in the letter ‘a’ i.e. latest release is ‘Maya’ version 13.
There are also 4 additional sub-flavours of Linux Mint to choose from, these are XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate and KDE. These sub-flavours are effectively the desktop environments the user is presented with i.e. GUI.
Weighing up all these factors we chose the version based on Ubuntu, settling on the XFCE desktop environment.
Further reading and sources of information for Linux Mint:
IT12B Network Project 