Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may remember, some Canonical developers have criticized Linux Mint’s security, for not upgrading some packages, including: the kernel, X.Org, Firefox, the boot-loader and many others.
Clement Lefebvre, the main Linux Mint developer, answered on the official Linux Mint blog that the user can easily enable Kernel updates, via the Update Manager, despite the fact that security upgrades are not applied by default.
Clem:
Anybody running Mint can launch Update Manager -> Edit -> Preferences and enable level 4 and 5 updates, thus making their Linux Mint as ‘Secure’ and ‘Unstable’ as Ubuntu,
In reality, both Ubuntu and Linux Mint use the same Firefox packages. Also, Clem states in his blog post that Canonical is not documented enough about Linux Mint and LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition), in order to be able to have such opinions.
via lffl.org