I’ve been wondering why Mint doesn’t seem to have an automatic major version upgrade built in? For those that have an opinion, do you agree with not having this? Why/why not?
I’ve been running Mint 21 for over a year now. I started using it not long before Mint 22 came out and have been dragging my feet on upgrading in fear of breaking something and having to reinstall (and losing something in the process). I’m in the process of setting up proper backups so I’ll probably do it after those are set up (or maybe wait until Mint 23).
I don’t think there’s any versioned Linux distros that do automatic major version updates. Only rolling release distros like Arch.
FWIW, some (perhaps even most/all) uBlue derivatives actually do automatic major version updates. Though, thanks to the bootc-model, they’re dealing with a whole lot less state(/moving parts); hence smooth updates are somewhat expected. The built-in rollback functionality doesn’t hurt either.
More than that I think it’s a prerequisite for doing this.
You might be absolutely correct on that.
Though, I do wonder what would prevent a stateless system accompanied by a healthy dose of integrity tests from pulling this off.
Or rolling like Tumbleweed
Not sure why the downvote, other than that they specified “versioned” (not rolling).
All rolling distros obviously auto-upgrade by definition.
Yeah not sure, and tumbleweed is “versioned” in a way you get a discrete/prescribed set of updates when the dated build is ready…you can always update packages out of sync with the distribution upgrade I guess
Debian has been doing so since forever without breaking. I tried Mint when it was the latest shit on a new laptop and was quite fond of it. Until it was time to update. I chose to upgrade - to plain, old Debian that had been running on my servers, workstations and PCs since 2002 and still does. How a Debian-derived distro could fuck up the one thing that makes Deian stand out -the nearly unbreakable packet management system- still is beyond my understanding.
Debian does not do major distro version upgrades automatically. You need to run dist-upgrade to go ahead a major release.
Sure. But MInt doesn’t do dist-.upgrade at all. Or it didn’t when I tried some years ago. IDK what the situation is now, but then Mint’s FAQ said you’d have to do a fresh install.
Yes, they do, via the mintupgrade tool.