That’s not a feature of Ubuntu, more so the installer itself. I’m sure many distros, especially Ubuntu-based one will ship with the exact same installer. Idk if mint uses the same installer, but it would really surprise me that the option isn’t available.
Thankfully it’s pretty easy to confirm by yourself. Grab a USB key, flash the ISO and have a look at it!
Yes, any distro with a live ISO will allow you to try it on a USB and dual boot if you want.
Well, maybe. My explanation was an oversimplification.
You can always try it and see for yourself (in a VM of course).
In Linux, the root of the filesystem is /
The command would remove recursively every file/directory in the filesystem, essentially nuking the whole system.
You could use debian testing. It’s a somewhat “rolling-release” model. You will get more up to date packages with more stability too.
You could also use unstable, but I wouldn’t recommend it personally.
Edit: if you really need the most up to date version of some packages, you can pin them to use the unstable repo. This would be a pretty reasonable solution.
Awesome! I haven’t looked at mint in quite a few years, but I would recommend cinnamon as the default.
MATE and XFCE are mostly targeted towards older hardware.