Clement Lefebvre, the creator of Linux Mint and one of the developers, has commented on the statements made by one of the Ubuntu devs, Oliver Grawert.

In short, Oliver said that Linux Mint was a very unsecure operating system because its developers chose not to provide the updates pushed by Canonical for Ubuntu. In case you didn’t know, Linux Mint is using Ubuntu as a base.

"We explained in 2007 what the shortcomings were with the way Ubuntu recommends their users to blindly apply all available updates. We explained the problems associated with regressions and we implemented a solution we’re very happy with."

"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," said Clement Lefebvre.

In other words, Linux Mint users are free to get the latest updates from the Ubuntu repositories, but it’s not recommended by the Mint developers.