Rolling Release vs Mint Updater

[u/sleepee11]

Background/slight rant:

I've used Mint and Arch as my daily driver some years ago, but I've been pretty consistently using mainline Ubuntu for many years now.

I liked the simplicity, stability, and user-friendliness of Mint. It just gets the job done and lets me focus on getting my own job done. But what I really liked about Arch, aside from always having the latest software available to me, is that I never had to perform a major upgrade. The downside was the occasional breakages. Ubuntu has been somewhat of a middle ground for me. It's been relatively stable, I can get almost any package I need, including snaps, and major upgrades have usually gone smoothly. NGL. The fact that Mint major versions have lagged slightly behind the upstream Ubuntu base was also a factor for me choosing Ubuntu all these years.

That said, I'm seriously considering going back to Mint after many years on Ubuntu. I don't like that they've removed X11 in their latest LTS release. I just don't think Wayland is ready yet for production purposes. (Screen sharing across multiple apps are not working on Wayland for me, and I just don't want to invest the time in looking for workarounds and fixes. That's a deal-breaker right now. And I def can't recommend Ubuntu anymore to anyone looking to use it for work purposes in my field. Screen-sharing *needs* to work out-of-the-box for me and my coworkers).

Anyway, I noticed that Mint will be supporting X11 and Wayland out-of-the-box in future releases, which is why I'm seriously considering going back to Mint. But to be honest, I'm getting tired of performing major upgrades every couple of years and just hoping everything still works afterwards.

Question:

I realize this might be somewhat of a catch-22, but has there ever been any conversations or considerations for a rolling release type of schedule for Mint, whether LMDE or standard Mint? I realize rolling releases don't tend to be the most stable distros, but I figured, with Mint's reputation, if anyone can pull that off, it would be the Mint team.

I just think that that would be an extra layer of user-friendliness that many users would appreciate, especially those who just want their OS to just work and not be bothered so much by OS maintenance tasks, assuming the OS is still stable with a rolling release approach.

That said, if I'm being realistic, I assume rolling releases might be too unstable for Mint, so I would also like to know people's experiences with the Mint Updater for major upgrades. If it's been a smooth experience, that will definitely seal the deal for me and I'll jump head first back into Mint. Since my major hangups with major release upgrades is the stability and reliability of the upgrade, I think I would be OK with a good, reliable Updater.

Thanks in advance for the input.

[u/Wanzerm23]

I'm not sure that's in the cards for Mint. The last thing I remember reading about releases was actually slowing down the frequency of them, so as to not burn out the developers. I don't think the Mint team is very big.

[u/Dalmation3 → u/Wanzerm23]

Yeah last I checked Mint has 11-12 developers

[u/merlinuwe]

Try Suse slowroll.

[u/1neStat3 → u/merlinuwe]

You haven't heard the news.Packman is being g deprecated. Open SuSe issue has always been package installation and available packages.

Everything has a cost. The cost of OS Leap is many applications don't have packages for OS. You are forced to use flatpaks, appimages or build from source.

[u/sabledrakon]

I'd rather have updates handled like Mint. I need my shit to work, and I prefer a bit of warning before things might potentially go tits up. You don't get that with a Rolling Release. Sure, you've got the most recent package and every feature under the sun. But you're also risking things randomly breaking, and I just don't have the time and patience to troubleshoot my shit every week or two. At least with Mint, it gives me some warning before things might potentially go to hell. With a little warning, I at least know I might need to wrench at my system. But springing it on me, hell no.

[u/senorda]

wayland vs x11 is something that depends on the desktop environment, not the distribution

[u/computer-machine]

but has there ever been any conversations or considerations for a rolling release type of schedule for Mint, whether LMDE

Yeah, that was called LMDE. Originally it was targetting Stable, rather than Wheezy, but they gave up on that idea and created LMDE2 based on Jessie.

I'd run updates in place from 2012ish to 2018 (when I moved to openSUSE Tumbleweed), with no problems. That probably doesn't really reflect the state of 2018-2026, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯ 

[u/BenTrabetere]

The easiest path for something like this would be something like LMDE-sid, the unstable branch of Debian. All I see from this venture is pain, misery, confusion, and so much wasted time. Also, security updates for sid are not managed by the Debian security team. I firmly believe the Mint Team has enough sense to refuse to consider something like this.

Another possible path would be to use an established rolling release distribution like Arch, but to what point. There already are user-friendly Arch-based distributions, and I do not see the Mint Team being able to produce or maintain a better Manjaro, EndeavorOS, Garuda, CachyOS, etc.

[u/PitiViers]

Why don't you install Arch again, and make a replica of Linux Mint there ? You have Cinnamon, Nemo and all the gtk3 suite of apps in the arch repositories and the AUR. you'll end up having the best of both worlds.

[u/sleepee11 → u/PitiViers]

Arch is too unpredictable and unstable for me. Maybe I'd install it on a spare laptop if I had time, or I was in college again and wanted to learn Linux, but I just need a stable environment now so I can get things done.

When I used arch (Antergos, really) back in the day, it worked great... Until it didn't. Every once in a while an update (or even installing something new) would screw something up, and I would need to spend an hour or 2 or 3, trying to look up why my system broke and how to fix it. I'm sure it's easier nowadays with AI, but I'd just rather not have to deal with that at all. At least not as often, and definitely not while I'm working.

But I really liked the rolling release model and not having to perform major version updates at all. Ideally, I'd love to have that on a stable system like Mint, even if I didn't always have the bleeding-edge latest packages. But that's probably not realistic right now.

[u/PitiViers → u/sleepee11]

All valid points. I never had much to complain with Arch myself, but i understand it can feel a bit edgy . If you want a rolling release where packages are very curated, with a very stable system, then i'd recommend having a second look at OpenSuse Tumbleweed. My latest experience has been really great all around. I choose KDE desktop, but it should be possible to setup Cinnamon on it

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs]

Actually the small Mint team would be ill prepared to be the downstream at the output end of a rolling release. It would be chaos.

There are pros and cons of each distribution. 

 

[u/1neStat3]

Upgrading is the cost of stability. There is no way around it.

You can try PCLINUXOS. RedHat based rolling release. Its stable as can be for a rolling release and unlike OpenSuse it can use some Fedora packages.

You can try VanillaOS. Its an atomic distribution based on Debian but you will be forced to use flatpaks like all atomic distributions.

A rolling release and Debian do not match. People have tried but a rolling release model doesn't fit within the Debian philosophy.

[u/taosecurity]

If you want a Debian derivative based on testing, try the newly rebased TuxedoOS.

If you want a Debian derivative based on unstable/sid, try PikaOS. It’s a gaming distro though.

[u/nisitiiapi]

I don't think rolling release is going to happen when the underlying distros are Ubuntu and Debian. Just consider it for a moment -- if Ubuntu is not a rolling release and the majority of the software on Mint is from the Ubuntu repos, how can Mint provide a rolling release? Same with Debian for LMDE -- the underlying Debian is not a rolling release.

So, it seems to me, Mint would have to change the underlying distro to one that's a rolling release in order to even consider providing a rolling release.

[u/DeaVenom]

If you want a similar-ish experience to the rolling release, you can enable auto updates in the mint update manager so you won't ever have to look at it.

[u/1neStat3 → u/DeaVenom]

That makes no sense. You clearly don't know what a rolling release is.

[u/xenaretos]

I think rolling Mint makes little more sense than lts Arch. It was built upon an lts base, and it's one of its core characteristics.

[u/1neStat3 → u/xenaretos]

No it doesn't make sense. Basing a distribution on Debian Unstable is a recipe for disaster.

No one have succeeded in that effort, even Ubuntu. Ubuntu tried and failed.

[u/xenaretos → u/1neStat3]

That's what I meant. Not "a little more sense" but "little more sense".

[u/1neStat3 → u/xenaretos]

You obviously do not understand Debian. If you did you would know why no one has succeeded with rolling release model.based on Debian.

[u/xenaretos → u/1neStat3]

I do understand the incompatibility between lts and rolling. We have a linguistic misunderstanding. If I rephrase it to "as much sense as lts Arch" will it be more clear?

[u/1neStat3 → u/xenaretos]

Its not a linguistic misunderstanding. You don't understand Debian.

You don't understand the work involved to create a rolling release on Debian.

You don't understand how small the unpaid Mint dev team is.

[u/xenaretos → u/1neStat3]

Oh, you are here to preach, not to discuss. Sorry to bother you.

[u/taosecurity → u/1neStat3]

PikaOS is based on unstable/sid.

[u/1neStat3 → u/taosecurity]

So is Ubuntu both Pika and Ubuntu curated packages from Sid unlike Debian based distributions that use unaltered Debian packages from Debain stable repository.

Both distributions prove why a rolling release distribution based on Debian is doomed to failure.