“A third-party developer had asked for help to build an Ubuntu MATE Remix based on Ubuntu 14.04, and people wondered what the point was when Linux Mint already featured such a desktop environment,” Softpedia reports.
One of the Ubuntu developers, Oliver Grawert, originally pointed out that it is not necessary that security updates from Ubuntu get down to Linux Mint users since changes from X.Org, the kernel, Firefox, the boot-loader, and other core components are blocked from being automatically upgraded.
Grawert explained, “this is the list of packages it will never update, instead of just integrating changes properly with the packages in the ubuntu archive they instead suppress doing (security) updates at all for them. I would say forcefully keeping a vulnerable kernel browser or xorg in place instead of allowing the provided security updates to be installer makes it a vulnerable system, yes. I personally wouldn’t do online banking with it ;)”