Linux Mint is based off of Ubuntu which is based off of Debian, all Linux Operating Systems for computers that are free and open-source under the Gnu General Public License. It has a release schedule of twice per year, usually May and November, and is released with code names using a female first name starting with the letter whose alphabetical index corresponds to the version number and ending with the letter "a". Linux Mint comes with many different desktop environments depending on the version you get: GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Xfce. Many features of Linux Mint are how many software packages and multimedia codecs come pre-integrated with the OS.