Linux Mint 21.3 EDGE Moving To Linux 6.5 Due To Hardware Issues

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Mint 21.3 EDGE Moving To Linux 6.2 Due To Hardware Issues

Given the pace of hardware support and improvements these days, it's rather sad Linux Mint 21.3 continues to default to the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel that is the non-HWE default of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for which the operating system is based. But at least Linux Mint 21.3 EDGE ISOs are being rolled out to make Linux 6.2 easily available for those with newer hardware support requirements...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Mint-EDGE-To-Linux-6.2

[V1tol]

People on rolling distros:
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[vipor29]

there is no reason at this point to have an old kernel like that unless your running old hardware. but if you want to run the new arc cards or new amd cards your gonna have to upgrade the kernel.

[Danny3]

And they said that they don't support KDE Plasma because it takes too much resources and they want to focus on improving other things.
I see that it worked very well for them...
Like all the Vulnrabilities that X has and are still there.

10 years ago Linux Mint was very nice, now it seems it cannot catch a break from something being bad.

[ThomasD]

Why 6.2 and not the current stable 6.6.9 or the latest LTS version 6.1?

[MarkG]

Interesting. I'm running Mint 21.2 on an AMD 5700G, and currently using their 6.5 kernel. I had 'issues' with kernels from their 5.15 and (short lived) 5.19 series via Mint's Update Manager's offerings, and it took 3 or 4 versions of their 6.2 series for the machine to get happy. Later 6.2 and 6.5 has been perfect so far.

Issues with earlier kernels mostly centered around the graphics, where 3 instances of VLC (eg, watching 3 OTA TV channels at once via my HDHomeRun box) would hang-hard VLC with dmesg's about DRM timeouts. And for a while on the older kernels I needed to turn off h/w acceleration in my browsers (FF, Chromium and Vivaldi) to be able to get Pluto or Tubi to run for several hours.

My old Dell i5 based laptop has never had a problem running 6.5, so I agree that going back to 5.15 is "sad". I guess HWE FTW with Mint.

[rcalixte]

Why 6.2 and not the current stable 6.6.9 or the latest LTS version 6.1?

All the kernels in Mint and LMDE are provided by upstream Ubuntu and Debian respectively. The team does not handle packaging for any kernels themselves.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

All the kernels in Mint and LMDE are provided by upstream Ubuntu and Debian respectively. The team does not handle packaging for any kernels themselves.

This is often true for downstream distros. That being said, it doesn't seem like it would be much work to just use the Ubuntu kernel config as the starting point and package a vanilla <latest_lts> set of kernel packages. No patches. Don't worry about further optimization. Just create a bog standard 6.6 package that will get rebuilt automatically as point releases come out for the next year, then create a new one for the next LTS.

[rcalixte]

This is often true for downstream distros. That being said, it doesn't seem like it would be much work to just use the Ubuntu kernel config as the starting point and package a vanilla <latest_lts> set of kernel packages. No patches. Don't worry about further optimization. Just create a bog standard 6.6 package that will get rebuilt automatically as point releases come out for the next year, then create a new one for the next LTS.

They don't do any customization. More work for a small team for a key component is energy that isn't well spent. What if there are bugs in the kernel just like what happened with the 6.6 and 6.1 LTS releases recently? Canonical and Ubuntu package newer kernels quickly enough and 6.5 will be on the way in a month or two. The Mint team has an improved build system now so it's trivial that they could do a 6.5 ISO soon enough if they wanted to. As of now, Ubuntu's latest 22.04 LTS HWE kernel offering is 6.2 (they don't follow the upstream kernel LTS kernel designations other than for the initial LTS release kernel). Also 5.15 is the main kernel on the main iSO due to the extended support life for that kernel. Defaulting to something other than 5.15 would mean needing to refresh the media much more consistently. Link

Here are the kernels available from Canonical/Ubuntu upstream as of today for the amd64 platform. They typically select the release kernels for the non-LTS releases as the LTS HWE kernel updates.

linux-headers-generic-hwe-22.04 | 5.15.0.25.27 | jammy | amd64
linux-headers-generic-hwe-22.04 | 6.2.0.20.20 | lunar | amd64
linux-headers-generic-hwe-22.04 | 6.2.0.39.39 | lunar-security | amd64
linux-headers-generic-hwe-22.04 | 6.2.0.39.39 | lunar-updates | amd64
linux-headers-generic-hwe-22.04 | 6.2.0.39.40~22.04.16 | jammy-security | amd64
linux-headers-generic-hwe-22.04 | 6.2.0.39.40~22.04.16 | jammy-updates | amd64
linux-headers-generic-hwe-22.04 | 6.5.0.9.11 | mantic | amd64
linux-headers-generic-hwe-22.04 | 6.5.0.9.11 | noble | amd64
linux-headers-generic-hwe-22.04 | 6.5.0.14.14~22.04.7 | jammy-proposed | amd64
linux-headers-generic-hwe-22.04 | 6.5.0.14.16 | mantic-security | amd64
linux-headers-generic-hwe-22.04 | 6.5.0.14.16 | mantic-updates | amd64
linux-headers-generic-hwe-22.04 | 6.6.0-14.14 | noble-proposed | amd64

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[DanL]

Like all the vulnerabilities that X has and are still there.

Mint uses the same Xserver that Ubuntu does (which was recently updated to latest upstream) and they're working on Wayland in Cinnamon. And yes, they have limited resources and chose not to continue the KDE flavor. Should they have just discontinued Cinnamon instead or not worked on Wayland?
As usual, you seem to be bitching for the sake of bitching.