Mint 17 18 19 and 20 all to be based on the 14.04 LTS ?

Mark_Greaves_PCNetSp · 24 March 2014 21:07

Clement Lefebvre (Linux Mint Project Leader), hints in a blog response that Mint 17, 18, 19, and 20 may all stick with the Ubuntu LTS as a common base.

Clement Lefebvre:

“The decision wasn’t made yet, and after/if it is made we can always adapt it based on how things go. The length of the support is an element but it’s not the most important one at play. There’s also an element of quality and a wish to run mature and proven software rather than to jump on brand new frameworks, techs and toolkits every 6 months. And then there’s the fact that we want to develop more. We want to push innovation on Cinnamon, be more active in the development of MATE, better support Mint tools and engage in projects we’ve postponed for years. So the idea is to boost all that by only adapting to new bases once every 2 years, to better commit to that one base shared by all releases and to better support it, and to have our hands freed to do exciting stuff. Note that all will become important post-Qiana though, around November 2014”.

Sources:

and
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2594

chemicalfan · 25 March 2014 08:32

Yeah, I read this - can’t see that it’ll happen “as is” though, as they tend to upgrade Cinnamon between releases, and over 4 releases it’s bound to need to use an upgraded GTK3 toolkit. So, they could backport GTK3 to keep up (messy!!), or hold back on Cinnamon development…

I totally understand their point though, a 9 month support period is a COMPLETE turnoff for me

Mark_Greaves_PCNetSp · 25 March 2014 10:28

I agree, that 9 month life cycle is a pain in the…

It make you not want to bother … 18 months was about right.

If you think about it, if everyone skips the non-LTS’s because of the 9 month cycle, Ubuntu would get zero testing/feedback … I think (where possible) everyone should boycott non-LTS’s or at least provide no feedback until they extend support to 18 months again.

SeZo · 25 March 2014 21:09

So, this is going to be some point release every 6 months.
What about kernel, new software etc?
LMDE seems more and more appealing, at least it will be up-to date more often than the Ubuntu base.

Mark_Greaves_PCNetSp · 25 March 2014 21:45

In light of another recent comment by Clem, maybe that’s the intention … to get people to move to LMDE

Clement Lefebvre:

I really enjoy working with Debian and I’m really happy with the quality of LMDE. I can see a few things which are better on the Ubuntu side, but also things that are better here with Debian. Overall I’d say they’re pretty much on par at this stage, with a little advantage going to Ubuntu because it’s frozen, thus doesn’t require people to read/understand the problematics related to APT upgrades.

The big difference though is popularity and adoption. LMDE started as an R&D project, it was successful and so we continued it. Nowadays it’s as popular as one of our DE editions, but it requires maintaining on a different base, testing UPs and it is declined into two DEs. That’s a lot of extra work compared to a MATE, Xfce or KDE edition.

It would have to become more popular and gather wider adoption from the community for us to put more resources into it. We’re giving it our best shot each time and we hope people will enjoy it, but at the end of the day our focus needs to reflect what the majority of our users want. LMDE is special, it’s extremely exciting to work on, it holds strategic interests (in the eventuality of a complete departure from Ubuntu for instance) and it keeps getting better. But it does need more adoption and we do spend too much resources on it already with the current level of adoption.

Source:
http://www.itworld.com/open-source/407741/will-linux-mint-debian-edition-survive

SeZo · 25 March 2014 22:17

Yes, I always thought that LMDE was in existence to provide an escape route from Ubuntu. It is a shame that it does not get as much effort put in as do the Ubuntu based flavours. I have only switched away from LMDE when Mint dropped the XFCE version. Luckily the original Mint developers continued to develop it in the form of SolydX(K).

chemicalfan · 26 March 2014 09:03

I’ve played with LMDE a few times, installed it on the in-laws PC at the weekend. Biggest problem LMDE has is updates. Out of the box, you only get “update packs” from Debian, which come in a big lump every 3 months or so (kinda like a Windows Service Pack, except Windows also issued the updates individually as well). This means that you don’t get security updates, or updates of any kind (bug fixes, etc). It’s because, like on the main Ubuntu releases, Debian Testing is mirrored at a specific point, and that forms that release. The difference, is that Ubuntu constantly maintain the packages themselves throughout the life of the release, patching and backporting things. This isn’t true of LMDE - what you see is what you get following an update pack (excluding Mint software).

The only way to do it as a “running” system, is to change your sources to point directly at Debian Testing. This means you get tons of updates, at a decent risk of instability. Until Debian Testing is frozen for 6 months prior to release - then, you get jack all. It’s a bit of a security nightmare, to be honest. I’d sooner that LMDE pointed at Debian Stable, then ran some kind of backport repo of cherry-picked packages from Testing (bit of a nightmare to maintain though, and your selected packages still won’t get security patches). You can’t please all the people all the time though - as much as people bash Ubuntu, they seem to have the perfect balance between up-to-date software, and stability.