After using Linux Mint Debian Edition for the last year, I have recently become somewhat frustrated by fglrx problems that (as best as I could determine) were only found in LMDE x64. So, clonezilla work done backing up / and /home, I took the plunge and installed a Debian base system (no desktop, no utilities etc), and went to work with apt-get.
Now I have a system that does everything that LMDE did, and looks just as pretty, but without the bloat, and everything works. As an example of how even Linux distros can get bloated:
LMDE / partition (used) 32Gb
Debian / partition (used) 7.6Gb
This for the same functionality
And I get to cherry pick what I do and don't want.