woodsman wrote:Cinnamon is a flagship product of the Mint project. While LMDE will be based on Debian stable, Clem's announcement in segfault hints at an active backports repository in LMDE. I hope one way or another Cinnamon remains current in LMDE.
Likewise with MATE too.

Clem says in the segfault post, and as has already be cited in this thread, that what they are considering is that "New software would get into LMDE first." It seems clear, since the stable base won't get new versions of packages, that "new software" means Mint specific software, like Cinnamon and Mate, might go to LMDE first, before even regular Linux Mint. So those desktops may be kept more up to date in LMDE Betsy, they even in regular Mint. There's also a comment on that post, where Clem further clarifies the plan:
It means that Betsy would receive package updates via APT (apt-get, update manager etc..) for features planned/introduced in the latest 17.x releases.
For instance, Mint 17 has Cinnamon 2.2, Mint 17.1 has Cinnamon 2.4, Mint 17.2 will have Cinnamon 2.6, Mint 17.3 will have Cinnamon 2.8… etc. On the LMDE side, Betsy has Cinnamon 2.4 at the moment, 2.6 later on, 2.8 later on…
http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2015/02/a ... ent-242126
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This past August, in the first comment on a Linux Mint Blog post, Clem says that popular applications and even desktops (I think that's what he means by "DEs") will be backported in LMDE Betsy:
Edit by Clem: Hi Mike, there won’t be any UP9 or UP10, these were snapshots, update packs. We’ll move from UP8 to Jessie, after that the base will be the same as in Debian. In terms of release management we’ll have to make sure things continue to work for both bases for a while and people can make the jump when it suits them, so at some stage we’ll have UP8 as you know it now and a set of repositories ready for you to jump to (probably very similar to how it works in Mint, with a Jessie set on packages.linuxmint.com and a Debian Jessie base). On top of Jessie, we’ll be doing something similar to what we’re doing with Trusty… i.e. you’ll get security updates and bug fixes from upstream on an ongoing basis with the same filter/policy as in mintupdate and we’ll backport popular apps, DEs and Mint tools. Based on the popularity of LMDE we’ll need to decide a few additional details when it comes to release strategy (namely multi-tracking and the ability to opt-in between point releases).
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2606#comment-106715
The whole idea of shifting to Debian Stable for LMDE and to LTS for regular Linux Mint is to allow both to have stable bases, while being kept up to date in the desktops and applications that they use. It's supposed to, as far as I understand, allow for more consistent and fresh up dates to the applications people actually use, by freeing up time spent on just keeping the system working, since they won't have to worry about the base so much. So in some ways LMDE and regular Mint should be more up to date and more fresh, with the new plan.