mk, you might like to read it as well. Debian is really good, I do recommend giving it at least a try sometime. But bare in mind that because it focuses on stability you might end up having problems with installing some of the programs due to version requirements. If you have nVidia hardware instead of AMD you are better covered anyway (better support in general in my experience and drivers from nVidia don't leave you with impression that Linux is on the furthest backburner possible), but you might end up being frustrated that program N requires (for example) xorg 6.5.5 but even in Debian SID (most unstable and with newest software) they only recently added 6.3.4. Numbers made-up for purpose of example. Overall, Mint is much less fussy for people who don't want to dwell too much in command line but Debian is by no means a bad system. However, since it's a basis for *buntu and Mint and many other distributions you have to be aware that there are some extra steps to do in order to improve some functionality or use fairly recent software.
Who would have guessed? ;) Just to add one thing: Debian has its place, when setting up a server stability should be fairly high on the priorities list (this is freaking weird thing to say to Hubski admin :D). Same thing with systems like CentOS or RedHat Linux. Sure, you can use them on your desktop/personal laptop and don't mind staying within delivered software. But if you just must get something to work that requires new stuff, it can get painful. The computational grid for students at my university actually runs Debian (and the one for researchers is either CentOS or RedHat) and according to the admin it never had any problems once the setup was completed. And as you can probably guess, majority of the first year is close to monkeys who try to run code that due to intended or unintended error can have something along the lines of: double * velocity = (double*)malloc(N_PARTICLES << sizeof(double)); :D. Chance of having something like that on your personal machine are significantly less than when you have 300 people with ssh access and too much free time on their hands ;). const unsigned N_PARTICLES = 10000000U;