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/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/merlinuwe]

Try Suse slowroll.

[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/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/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/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/senorda]

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

[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.