[ALUG] Mint

I'm asking this on behalf of a friend. Thoughts on Mint, please. He's after an operating system that works on a usb stick and wants a 'bulletproof workstation not a server'. Does Mint have better firewall/security than Debian/Ubuntu? He is Puppy aware, by the way. If you have additional contributions on CrunchBang, lob them in too. Bev.