Spy_Gentleman: Not all of em, I remember trying to compile VBA-M. It lacked one library and in Mint's repo it didn't exist. Whereas at Ubuntu one it does. I just suggest grabbing Ubuntu and then install Cinnamon desktop session and use that instead.
adamhm: Well Mint uses the same repositories as Ubuntu (as well as its own in addition to that)... although Mint sticks to the LTS releases of Ubuntu so it'll only have access to packages available to those releases. Which library did it need?
And both Ubuntu and Mint are by their very foundation, Debian based
Which brings another slew of (hilarious) problems into the matter. Due to the way Debian is built, it can be 6 months to a year before an innovation, major UI update, or new module arrives. Which to put in uncouth terms is a long ass time in the world of computing.
For example, Wayland. Wayland is at this point, drop in ready to go with a few missing things that the kind people on multiple codebases are working on. Gnome already has it, but apparently Cinnamon could be waiting until 2018 to have it fully ready, plus accounting for downstream time. As for Mate, there isn't a clear timeline. What is clear is that many major DE are retiring X, and minor ones are being built around Wayland.
I don't exactly want to try and have someone try and open something 6 months later only for them to be missing a key feature because Debian won't get that update for another 6 months.
But here I am, on Fedora with my choice of DM/DE, and VBA-M is in the RPM fusion.
To be honest, I'm not sure why I typed all that, I think I had a rant raring to go.