Not so with Mint 16 Xfce, it includes Firefox/Thunderbird, LibreOffice, GIMP, VLC, Banshee and a whole lot more. This distribution stands on equal terms with the others in the Mint family, the difference is just in the desktop. The updates and improvements in this release are similar to those in the other versions; check New features in Linux Mint 16 Xfce for details.