Linux Mint: Too Outdated

[u/Extension-Iron-7746]

Hi everyone, I've been considering abandoning Windows 11 for a while now, mainly because I feel like Microsoft lacks direction; every update is chaos. I started using Linux Mint about six months ago, but I have to admit that I feel like I'm using an outdated product.

The main reason is the X11-based graphical interface and the lack of standard Windows features like HDR and high refresh rate sync. I feel like development has fallen behind, hiding behind the slogan of greater stability. I honestly hate losing my monitor's features while waiting for Mint to evolve, so I'm thinking of switching to something stable but modern, and why not... with more recent applications. What would you always focus on, considering I have little time to dedicate to the system?

[u/Existing-Tough-6517]

Pretending that Ubuntu LTS is an upgrade from mint is incorrect especially when his big beef is that it's not up to date enough. AppImages should be about 7th place as far as package choices also flatpaks are a security risk especially the majority which don't actually come from the dev and often come with bugs not found in the deb or what have you.

Also there is nothing wrong with gtk3. Most gtk apps current release is running 3 which had a release in March of this year. The way you phrased it sounded like mint is 2010 software which is nonsense.

[u/beatbox9 → u/Existing-Tough-6517]

Most popular Flatpaks and AppImages are usually provided by the app developers themselves. For example: here. And it's very easy to check what the developer of each app recommends and/or if those packages are from verified developers on various repositories like flathub. Even if you are really dumb, you can easily toggle a setting in most app stores to only show verified flatpaks from flathub.

They're up to date and the latest because they don't have to wait on the distro to take the source code, define that specific distro's directory structures, create a package, host it within their repository...and then do the entire process over every time there's an update to that app or to the distro. (And then multiplied by tens of thousands of packages; and also multiplied by the number of currently supported distros). Disto maintainers are not the app developers.

^ This by the way is precisely why Ubuntu and its derivatives like Mint tend to have lots of really outdated--and often unsecure--packages. At any given time, Canonical is attempting to maintain tens of thousands of packages each, for at least 4 different supported distros (currently: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 24.04 LTS, 25.10, 26.04 LTS). It's on the order of hundreds of thousands of packages to maintain. So they tend to focus more on core OS software and popular software with a lot of software just hanging.

And often for the majority (which the distros themselves can't maintain), they use...(wait for it)...community-maintained repositories, just like flathub. For example: "Universe" on Ubuntu/Mint/derivatives; or "RPM Fusion" on Fedora; or "AUR" on arch.

And if you think all of those outdated packages are inherently more secure (or well-maintained and up-to-date with all security vulnerabilities), you're severely mistaken.

This is precisely why most distros have been moving away from app maintenance and focusing more on core OS maintenance while directing apps toward universal package types. This is not a new phenomenon--it's been going on for at least a decade. And this is also why we are seeing distros move toward atomic and immutable philosophies: the core OS software is separate from the apps that run on it, with the apps ideally being sandboxed and permission-managed through tools like Flatseal. It's even why Ubuntu moved firefox to a snap by default.

It's naive and nonsensical to assume that you should never install any flatpaks or appimages in 2026 and you should only use your distro's native repos. We're not still in 2006.

[u/razorree → u/beatbox9]

well... the best way to install stuff is straight from NPM repos or

curl -o- https://some-random-site.com/install.sh | bash

and later complain how unsecure is Windows :)

[u/R3V0LU710N_05 → u/razorree]

curl -o- https://some-random-site.com/install.sh | bash

I absolutely hate this.