Longtime Mint stickler here, never developed a taste for any other distro schools (Arch, Fedora, other *buntus and Debians). But tried out MX after a long period of deferring and I am genuinely blown away. This distro has everything I could have ever ask for - Debian stability coupled with advanced hardware support (with more recent zen kernels and drivers), a solid opinionated Plasma DE setup that is both minimalist and all-encompassing at the same time, and a full stock of sensible and pragmatic utilities to cover the boring stuff.
Mint’s relative lethargy at migrating to wayland has been increasingly becoming a sore point due to the sheer practical difference it makes (especially in terms of multi-monitor HiDPI and fractional scaling, in addition to security and performance). MX KDE has all that covered and then some. It’s the first time I had to genuinely stretch to find any fault. The only complaint I have is that they aren’t letting me post this testimonial in the MX forum because it doesn’t accept anon-aliased emails for logins.
TIL. That definitely puts me off, like WTF? How can you fuck up a perfectly upgradable Debian like that?
That’s definitely off-putting. Though, I do feel Debian can learn a thing or two for making major release updates more seamless. Perhaps it’s the doing of the law of equivalent exchange; after two[1] years of bliss (read: easy updates), we just have to accept a brief moment of intense suffering (read: way more involved update).
You can definitely use it longer, though two years feels like the sweet spot. ↩︎
True, there are legitimate reasons why most people use Ubuntu or a Ubuntu-derivative on desktop, rather than straight Debian.That said, last time I did a major release upgrade on a desktop Debian system, I did maybe half of these steps and it still went without issue. The only issue that ever comes up for me when I upgrade Debian or Ubuntu is that things change how they work and I need to redo some of my configuration to account for it, and I do so much custom configuration that it can be kind of PITA sometimes. But that wouldn’t be any different on any other distro.
I’m a big fan of skipping over one major release when upgrading, that way I get 4 (Ubuntu) or 5-6 (Debian) years of bliss. Software like webbrowsers, yt-dlp or Signal that needs to be really fresh is better installed through pip or flatpak anyway.
That’s cool and all. But, to give some context as to where I’m coming from: for the last 2-3 years or so, I receive automatic major release updates in the background. Sometimes, it takes me up to a week before I even notice it. I wish to see the day that Debian is released from its
UnattendedUpgrades shackles and can ascend into pure bliss.I’m too paranoid on security to consider that 😅. But I’m glad it works out for you.
?
You can easily disable or uninstall unattended upgrades, and I would definitely have noticed if Debian’s unattended upgrades automatically did major release upgrades on its own …
IMO that’s not an issue at all, both Debian and Ubuntu are very good about providing security updates for their oldstable releases. Maybe your desktop environment or text editor isn’t going to receive updates anymore, but I have a really hard time imagining a relevant scenario where that makes a difference for security.
To be clear, the automatic major release updates in the background does not happen on Debian. I was describing the experience on my daily driver; which happens to be another distro. That’s why I wish to see the day in which Debian does receive this. I’m aware of UnattendedUpgrades doing minor upgrades only; so no major upgrades*.
I absolutely love the effort put in by Debian’s Security Team. But as they only provide it for three years after release, I don’t feel confident to continue using it, even if I value the work of the group of volunteers that make Debian LTS possible. Note that “too paranoid” were keywords in my previous message.
Why the hell would you want major release upgrades in unattended upgrades? This is exactly what most people specifically don’t want their OS to do.
The possibility of unattended major upgrades would without a doubt be an upgrade over this
mess. Even if it becomes possible, it doesn’t have to be enabled by default anyways. So, if you don’t like it, then you should be able to only make use of UnattendedUpgrades for minor upgrades; if at all*.Besides, I don’t think the crowds that use Fedora or Ubuntu Interim are necessarily opposed to it. Especially not if it’s just seamless. Like, what would be even there to oppose if it doesn’t introduce any troubles?
IMO, it’s fundamentally impossible to make this seamless, especially on a fixed release distro.