Linux Mint Is Sticking To Ubuntu LTS Releases

[Tiger_Coder]

Great, now Mint is going to be out of date nearly to the point of being useless.

What distro to I recommend to newbies now?

It is better if newbies use stable versions of linux. They don't want bleeding edge softwares which is going to be broken at some point. As browsers are getting updated is is enough. Also I think they will also update kernel and Xorg(like LTS point release).

And if they really want a piece of softwares updated version, I think adding a ppa is not that hard.

[Filiprino]

Probably I'll hang with this latest LTS thanks to the new policies of updating some other software appart from the kernel.
And adding PPA's shouldn't be a problem, I'm already doing it with some software packages.

[philipmorris]

Great, now Mint is going to be out of date nearly to the point of being useless.

What distro to I recommend to newbies now?

Manjaro you arch fanboy

[Luke]

Mint may have had little choice with the Mir situation

Mint is in an ugly position due to the rapid changes coming in the underlying stack. I had been wondering what they were going to do about the Mir/Wayland situation, and now there is the systemd transition as well.

OK, I have just established in my own machines that Cinnamon and Nemo work just fine over Systemd, which is no surprise because they don't use the init system. Wayland/Mir is entirely another story, and neither MATE nor Cinnamon has been ported to either one. Cinnamon's team should be able to look at the patches used by GNOME to use Wayland, but will have to either backport them to a very old verson of gnome-shell or else port the patches that turn gnome-shell into Cinnamon to a far newer version of gnome-shell. Mate might be easier: port it to GTK 3 and a lot of the job is done, as the window manager is not integrated into the taskbar or the menus. Port it to GTK3 and run it over Weston or another Wayland window manager.

Mint's decision to stick to LTS releases gives them 2 years to deal with this, and lets them avoid hurried work. By the time Ubuntu 15.10 comes out, a lot of the upstream work should be either done, scrapped, or delayed past 16.04, giving Mint a stable target to shoot at.

A bigger problem may or may not exist for those of us running Cinnamon in Ubuntu from PPA, and following either rolling releases or the alpha releases (as I do). The questions will be how long does X stay in repo or in the xorg-edgers PPA, and will Cinnamon build against newer versions of Ubuntu all the way through. In a real pinch, I suppose Cinnamon and all its libraries could be made into a "zero install" local folder package like the meltytech git builds of kdenlive. These usually work for top level apps on a whole cycle from one LTS to the next and sometimes more. This would work so long as Xorg remains installable, or locally installable. Would be an interesting use of the new "clickinstall" system to be sure-a whole DE installed locally or maybe in /usr/local.

It will be interesting to see what happens in Cinnamon PPA's, enough has been forked that it should work so long as clutter works with it and X is available. Also, any ports to Wayland would show up here, I would guess during the 16.04 alpha runup,

[bison]

Great, now Mint is going to be out of date nearly to the point of being useless.

What distro to I recommend to newbies now?

Linux Mint.

[rikkinho]

normal

linux mint is only ubuntu with cinnamon

[dee.]

Mint is in an ugly position due to the rapid changes coming in the underlying stack. I had been wondering what they were going to do about the Mir/Wayland situation, and now there is the systemd transition as well.

OK, I have just established in my own machines that Cinnamon and Nemo work just fine over Systemd, which is no surprise because they don't use the init system. Wayland/Mir is entirely another story, and neither MATE nor Cinnamon has been ported to either one. Cinnamon's team should be able to look at the patches used by GNOME to use Wayland, but will have to either backport them to a very old verson of gnome-shell or else port the patches that turn gnome-shell into Cinnamon to a far newer version of gnome-shell. Mate might be easier: port it to GTK 3 and a lot of the job is done, as the window manager is not integrated into the taskbar or the menus. Port it to GTK3 and run it over Weston or another Wayland window manager.

IIRC, the MATE developers are already planning a transition to Wayland.

As for Cinnamon, there hasn't really been any kind of definite answer on what the Cinnamon devs plan to do about the Wayland/Mir situation (and believe me, many have asked). Clem's stance is that Mint (at least the Cinnamon version) will use whatever works the best for the users, and at the moment that is Xorg. The question is what will they do in the future...

I think it's pretty obvious that Mint is not going to use Mir - that'd make no sense at all, as then there'd be two codebases to maintain instead of one: one with Cinnamon/Mir and one with Wayland/anything else - Wayland/KDE, Wayland/Xfce, Wayland/MATE... much easier to just use one codebase with Wayland for everything, just like they now can use Xorg with everything. So the only real question is, when are they going to move over from Xorg to Wayland and how will they handle the transition... Probably they will only consider the transition when Wayland is at 100% function parity with Xorg.

[dee.]

As for me, I'll be happy to move over to Mint 17 and use that for the next 2 years. I don't even have any bleeding-edge hardware so why would I need bleeding-edge kernels or other software... probably in 2 years time, Wayland will be ready and maybe we'll also get Cinnamon on Wayland by that time, which would be great.

[mike4]

I'm happy with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, I only miss session management in Unity. Does Cinamon have session management working? Gnome had it but seems broken in 3 and I don't feel like KDE.

[chrisb]

The questions will be how long does X stay in repo or in the xorg-edgers PPA

I wouldn't be surprised to see Xorg still in the Ubuntu 24.04 repositories. I haven't seen any proposals for removal, and I doubt there will be until all the major desktops have shifted away. 14.04LTS alone will be using and supporting Xorg till 2019. I suspect *buntus will be in a similar situation for 16.04.