Linux Mint Finds Many Of Its Users Are Running Behind On Security Updates

[szymon_g]

Ditto. I don't apply any updates on my Debian machines since day one. Any distribution can promise all they want, but when desktop Linux doesn't draw any distinctions between 'system' and 'user application' and treats them all as one homogeneous clump, there's no justifying the possible risk of a update to GTK3 or Qt5 suddenly breaking the entire GUI or a bunch of applications that see daily use.

have you tried the micrOS from SUSE? Fedora also runs something similar (afaik): basically, you have an OS on the properly pre-configured btrfs volumens, and normal apps (i.e. one that users actually care about) are in flatpaks (that can be on bttrfs too of course). if an upgrade goes badly, rollback to the earlier version is as simple as rebooting and using keyboard arrows to chose the desired date. not perfect, but its definitely easier with that.

[birdie]

have you tried the micrOS from SUSE? Fedora also runs something similar (afaik): basically, you have an OS on the properly pre-configured btrfs volumens, and normal apps (i.e. one that users actually care about) are in flatpaks (that can be on bttrfs too of course). if an upgrade goes badly, rollback to the earlier version is as simple as rebooting and using keyboard arrows to chose the desired date. not perfect, but its definitely easier with that.

While interesting this could be useful only for geeks/IT pros.

[Vistaus]

The reason is simple: users don't trust Linux updates and it's not without a reason (new Linux packages often come with drastic UI changes, regressions and new bugs).

Regressions and new bugs I can understand, but we're talking about SECURITY UPDATES here. In the >11 years I've been using various Linux distros, I've never ever seen a *security* update containing a "drastic UI change".

[Vistaus]

The operating system won't break, but they also become incompatible with certain user applications. Chrome and Firefox are not available for NT4, are you sure you want to use that ancient version of Internet Explorer to go online?

What do you mean Firefox is not available for NT4? There's an unofficial fork for NT4: https://github.com/rn10950/RetroZilla

[skeevy420]

have you tried the micrOS from SUSE? Fedora also runs something similar (afaik): basically, you have an OS on the properly pre-configured btrfs volumens, and normal apps (i.e. one that users actually care about) are in flatpaks (that can be on bttrfs too of course). if an upgrade goes badly, rollback to the earlier version is as simple as rebooting and using keyboard arrows to chose the desired date. not perfect, but its definitely easier with that.

The Fedora ones, Silverblue & Kinoite, get really tedious because you end up needing to layer special things that aren't Flatable or work in containers and you have to revert all of that whenever you update. I wish they'd make use of overlays and update the core os on a new volume (BTRFS, ZFS, LVM) and put special crap on a separate overlay volume. Every update you'd get a new boot environment tied to a new special crap environment.

[Vistaus]

While interesting this could be useful only for geeks/IT pros.

Geeks/IT pros: *want OS features to be as simple as possible for normal users*
Also geeks/IT pros: "Even when feature xyz is extremely simple, it's still not useful for normal users"

[duby229]

Geeks/IT pros: *want OS features to be as simple as possible for normal users*
Also geeks/IT pros: "Even when feature xyz is extremely simple, it's still not useful for normal users"

At least in-so-far as Linux goes... That's Gnome devs to the tee...

[numacross]

What do you mean Firefox is not available for NT4? There's an unofficial fork for NT4: https://github.com/rn10950/RetroZilla

You know that it's an ancient version, right? Firefox 3.0 from 2008 used Gecko 1.9 while RetroZilla uses 1.8.3. It does support modern crypto tho.

[birdie]

Regressions and new bugs I can understand, but we're talking about SECURITY UPDATES here. In the >11 years I've been using various Linux distros, I've never ever seen a *security* update containing a "drastic UI change".

Usually updates are bundled together as one. If I were a distro builder I'd force install security updates and even distro updates automatically (which you can opt out of) just like Windows does. Too many users are too dumb to trust them with updates. Android/Windows/iOS/MacOS all perform system updates near perfectly nowadays. Linux? I don't think it's even possible, e.g. I delayed an update from F32 to F32 for half a year (!!) because the latter didn't have an app available in the former due to broken dependencies (python and its intricate web of interdependencies).

Again it all boils down to the fact that Linux (distros) does not have a notion of base system which is safe to update except RHEL which is not a good distro for modern PCs/laptops.

[Duff~]

I still remember somebody saying Linux Mint 12 was the best release, therefore he was going to use it forever.
Some people logic is that way I guess.