Is Linux Mint In Trouble? (nerds.xyz) 50
BrianFagioli writes: The developers behind Linux Mint say the project is rethinking its release strategy and moving toward a longer development cycle, with the next version now expected around Christmas 2026. In a monthly update, project lead Clement Lefebvre said the team reached a "crossroads" and needs more flexibility to fix bugs, improve the desktop, and adapt to rapid changes across the Linux ecosystem. The upcoming development build, temporarily called Mint 23 "Alfa," is currently based on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and includes Linux kernel 7.0, an unstable build of Cinnamon 6.7, and early Wayland related work.
Mint is also replacing the long used Ubiquity installer with "live-installer," the same tool used by Linux Mint Debian Edition, allowing the project to unify installation infrastructure across its Ubuntu based and Debian based variants. While the team frames the changes as an opportunity to improve quality and reduce maintenance overhead, the shift has raised questions about the project's long term direction and whether Linux Mint may eventually lean more heavily on its Debian roots rather than its traditional Ubuntu base.
Mint is also replacing the long used Ubiquity installer with "live-installer," the same tool used by Linux Mint Debian Edition, allowing the project to unify installation infrastructure across its Ubuntu based and Debian based variants. While the team frames the changes as an opportunity to improve quality and reduce maintenance overhead, the shift has raised questions about the project's long term direction and whether Linux Mint may eventually lean more heavily on its Debian roots rather than its traditional Ubuntu base.
Is Linux Mint In Trouble? (Score:5, Insightful)
so - no - but need some click bait-y stupid headline...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Is Linux Mint In Trouble? (Score:2)
Nowhere in the body was it ever suggested Mint is in trouble. Like the headline wasnt even related to the content. This article should be removed just to stop this type of thing from being acceptable.
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Nowhere in the body was it ever suggested Mint is in trouble. Like the headline wasnt even related to the content. This article should be removed just to stop this type of thing from being acceptable.
I think a longer development cycle is actually a very good thing.
Many of us are trying to get work done. Not have the model of one particular company who would have us believe that the most important thing is the Operating System. All those applications and the work done on the computer is far less important. Irrelevant in fact.
Re: Is Linux Mint In Trouble? (Score:1)
Down with 3wb00nt3w - frinds don't let frinds run ewb00ntew â¼ï
I stopped recommending Linux Mint for a while when the future of LMDE (based on "Testing", a rolling distro, by the way) was in question.
I softened my stance when SNAP was disabled by default, and I'm starting to feel that the project is rightfully choosing the Debiantard Testing rolling distro while incorporating only the parts of ewb00ntew that enable the pleasures of newer "non-free" firmware.
The pressure to mirror an ewb00ntew
Why would that make them "in trouble?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Ubuntu ... Ugh (Score:5, Interesting)
Backstory: I started out with Gentoo and Mandrake Linux in '99. They were exciting, but ... messy and difficult.
Then, I started using Ubuntu on the job, and it was amazing. It felt like "Linux has finally arrived as a real OS!" It was incredible, and I thought the distro wars were all but over: Ubuntu won.
But then Shuttleworth (the maniac founder of Canonical/Ubuntu) thought the same thing, and started acting like the Bill Gates of the Linux community. Linux is supposed to be a community project, but he kept trying to force bad technical decisions on the rest of the community (eg. Unity).
Ultimately I switched to Linux Mint, which leveraged Ubuntu to offer great Linux ... without being constrained by Shuttleworth (eg. I run MATE or Cinnamon, not Unity).
TLDR; But what I care about, and I think what most people care about, is "Linux that works well". Few people give a damn about Ubuntu and Shuttleworth: if Linux Mint can deliver a great experience without them, it will be a *better* distro for it!
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How in the world did you write my story?
Exactly the same. Same origin story. Same frustration with Ubuntu. Same landing spot for same reasons.
Re:Ubuntu ... Ugh (Score:5, Informative)
As skogs says, same reason I ended up using Linux Mint for a good few years.
Trouble is, last time I installed it there seemed to be things that just didn't work properly or at all any more. I needed to give something else a try, so wiped my new Framework 13 and instead installed Debian. Wow, what a difference, everything works. I've also upgraded the hardware in my home server and installed Debian on that too which is also working faultlessly.
The thing that I really wish for more than anything else in Linux, is for some talented people, instead of faffing around working on second derivatives of something that already works, to pick up great projects that have for some reason been abandoned by their original developers, get them working properly again and back into the repositories. My first wish in this is for ufraw to be back in the repositories. It used to do exactly what such a tool should do - open a raw file from my camera, let me manipulate the brightness, contrast, curves etc. and save the result as a png file. Nothing else is needed. Software that people depend on should not just be abandoned. If I had any sort of a clue as to how to go about fixing it I would try to do so. Unfortunately I don't have that depth of knowledge so I carefully keep backed up an ancient Linux Mint VM that contains a working ufraw so that I can continue to use my K7 DSLR. Not ideal but it's the best that I've got for now.
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Have you considered hiring someone on a contract basis to maintain ufraw? If you depend on it, surely it's worth investing in.
My experience with Debian is similar. Much less broken stuff than Ubuntu or Mint. But also the usual problems with things changing in breaking ways between versions, which makes instructions on how to do things outdated within a year or two, 3rd party software stops building and so on... Like you, I have VMs with obsolete versions of Debian and Ubuntu, just to keep certain bits of so
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Debian is more stable but also more outdated, it's a tradeoff. I am making it as well (except that I'm using Devuan to avoid systemd) but it's a real drawback. For example KDE is sadly outdated so I don't have config options I'd really like to use.
Re: Ubuntu ... Ugh (Score:2)
https://aur.archlinux.org/pack... [archlinux.org]
Arch has nufraw, which is where the development of ufraw continues.
Personally it was Fedora -> Ubuntu -> Arch, and since 2015 when I installed it, never thought of another distro.
It simply works, even on my server (yeah, that brave:). On the notebook the same constantly updated installation is now on the third Thinkpad. Just grab the partitions with fsarchiver, transfer them to the new HW, keep going strong.
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Except that LMDE and Debian, compared to LM and Ubuntu, lock out a massive pool of application sources many people rely on, namely PPAs and other non-Debian-compatible apt repositories.
Re: Ubuntu ... Ugh (Score:1)
I concur, except for one thing...
Ewb00ntew was NEVER incredible.
That pronoun might be deserving of Debian Testing though. ðY'ðY
LMDE? (Score:3)
"whether Linux Mint may eventually lean more heavily on its Debian roots rather than its traditional Ubuntu base."
I know, they could call it Linux Mint Debian Edition... oh wait. They already have that.
As long as Mint can circumvent Debian's stubborness with Broadcom WiFi cards I don't see a problem here.
Fedora was only slightly better as the arcane incantation actually worked. The incantation also updated the kernel which I did not ask for but at least it all worked in the end.
Apple and Microsoft are both screwing up. If ever there was a time to ditch ideological purity and concentrate on getting drivers from whatever source working with a click (like the Broadcom drivers I can install in traditional Mint) this is it.
Re: LMDE? (Score:2)
I get PTSD thinking about Broadcom drivers
Raises hand (Score:3)
Linux Mint may eventually lean more heavily on its Debian roots rather than its traditional Ubuntu base.
And that would be bad why? Sure, Debian moves more slowly than Ubuntu, but but they're also not all-in on Snap. I'll take stability over cutting-edge for most things, especially if things that need more frequent (security) updates, like Firefox and Thunderbird, are also available - as packages. Also, don't most fixes from Ubuntu (and others) eventually get pushed upstream to Debian anyway?
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Because any Mint user used to getting significant amounts of stuff from PPAs and other non-Debian-compatible apt repositories will be effed as soon as they're forced to move to LMDE.
I'm of two minds about this (Score:3)
... whether Linux Mint may eventually lean more heavily on its Debian roots rather than its traditional Ubuntu base.
I'll second the click-bait concerns mentioned already in other comments. "In trouble" is too charged a term. That said, the last time I tried LMDE, I scurried back to the Mint based on Ubuntu - LMDE was just less refined and needed more intervention to get what I wanted.
I started out my Linux journey on Debian, but found that it became harder to maintain, and that even the "stable" version needed more effort than I wanted to put in to get what I wanted. So I went to Ubuntu, but jumped ship when they started pushing UIs and desktop interfaces that pissed me off. I tried Mint, and it turned out to be the nearly-perfect version for me.
What that means for me is that if Mint starts switching to LMDE exclusively, I may end up looking for another distro. So if there are a lot of other users like me - and I really don't know if that's the case - then it's just possible that Mint WILL be "in trouble" in the future if it drops its Ubuntu-based releases.
My "other mind" doesn't trust Ubuntu as a company, and welcomes the prospect of a distro that's not constantly fighting off the Snapification that Ubuntu is pushing. I have nothing against self-contained executables, but my experience of Snaps has not been good, and I much prefer AppImages - they "just work". I understand the objections around both memory bloat and storage bloat; but AppImages allow me easy access to applications - and versions of applications - that I can't get through repos without a lot of fiddling and risk of breakage.
I'm not too worried about this development just yet, but I think it's about time I gave LMDE another try. If I don't mind it too much, I may start migrating before it becomes necessary.
Not in trouble (Score:3)
Terrible title (Score:5, Informative)
The title of the post is terrible and in no way reflects the content of the announcement. People who post crap like that should be banned for spreading FUD.
No (Score:2)
It's not so easy. If major Linux Mint versions will now come eight months later even than their underlying Ubuntu LTS which already is slow, then that will become a problem for quite some users and thereby for Mint itself. And they wouldn't be doing that if their resources weren't too limited for keeping up the previous cadence which at least was acceptable. It isn't that far-fetched at all to use the word 'trouble' in this context.
Strange (Score:4, Interesting)
Mint a derivative distribution based on Ubuntu, which is a derivative distribution based on Debian. Debian -> Ubuntu -> Mint. OK I guess I get it.
But then they also have a Mint distribution that is a derivative of Debian? Debian -> Mint
Why so many derivatives and so much fracturing?
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Mint a derivative distribution based on Ubuntu, which is a derivative distribution based on Debian. Debian -> Ubuntu -> Mint. OK I guess I get it.
But then they also have a Mint distribution that is a derivative of Debian? Debian -> Mint
Why so many derivatives and so much fracturing?
Mint a derivative distribution based on Ubuntu, which is a derivative distribution based on Debian. Debian -> Ubuntu -> Mint. OK I guess I get it.
But then they also have a Mint distribution that is a derivative of Debian? Debian -> Mint
Why so many derivatives and so much fracturing?
Ubuntu is based on Debian Experimental instead of Debian Stable. Ubuntu does a lot of vetting of pachages, selection and such, and Mint benefits from that.
Even in the fully debian derived branch, a lot of pre-requisite work was done by Ubuntu, and LM derives information from those choices when building their Debian Editions.
If debian dies (which can happen, for example because right now they are having problems getting new members in the community), Ubuntu will have to sort the mess out, but they have the m
Re: Strange (Score:2)
"If debian dies (which can happen, for example because right now they are having problems getting new members in the community)"
Lol. Mint will be dead and forgotten while Debian is still providing the base of half of Linux. Ubuntu will be dead while Debian continues to provide the base of all Linux.
Mint is demonstrating with these latest decisions that they did not properly forecast the level of work they were generating for themselves with their decisions around release schedules and such.
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You don't seem to see how fragile all of this is. Debian is not invulnerable. Just because "half of Linux", most of which has no abundance on volunteer workforce, either, relies on Debian, that doesn't mean Debian couldn't die anytime soon. And the least bad outcome, if it actually did, probably would be a commercial takeover by one or more of the corporate entities that rely on Debian or derivatives of it, a takeover which would have to be crafted very carefully to not become as bad as it sounds, to not co
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Why can't Shuttleworth base LTS on stable for those of us who don't need new/shiny every six months based on a fork of sid?
I stick with upstream Debian on my home machine because I don't benefit from Canonical-isms. But forking the codebase every 6 months and then supporting one fork for 2 years as LTS seems like a wasted effort.
Lack of information.... (Score:2)
Because programmers are prissy little ******* who want things exactly their way (remember, I are one too), and Linux is based on a 50 year old concept of how an operating system should be. So, there's tons of improvements and changes that can be made to the Unix baseline to bring the system up to 2020's expectations. But anytime you give 100 passionate people open source that needs lots of changes, you end up with 110 different sets of changes. Plus, you have completely disparate sets of users (Developer
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If it would all coalesce into a *Nix version for everyone that _just_ works, things would look better for it.
If it could seamlessly run Windows programs natively (maybe even Mac stuff) (not in WINE or a VM... in a VM requires installing Windows in the VM, which defeats the purpose of installing *Nix in the first place)... after all, it's code... that would help tons toward adoption. .EXE and rewrite it so it'll install and work as a *Nix program.
Maybe *Nix could read the code in the
Ideally, it should be so
Re: Lack of information.... (Score:4, Interesting)
What you're wishing for is very much what WINE actually does. WINE is an (imperfect) implementation of Windows APIs. EXE files absolutely run "natively."
Sometimes it struggles with programs because it isn't an installation of Windows.
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As for running Windows code without you having to give permission on each an every occasion in triplicate, signed in blood - this sounds like a totally unacceptable security risk to me!
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If it would all coalesce into a *Nix version for everyone that _just_ works, things would look better for it.
If it could seamlessly run Windows programs natively (maybe even Mac stuff) (not in WINE or a VM... in a VM requires installing Windows in the VM, which defeats the purpose of installing *Nix in the first place)... after all, it's code... that would help tons toward adoption. Maybe *Nix could read the code in the .EXE and rewrite it so it'll install and work as a *Nix program.
Ideally, it should be so seamless that 'I leave the office on Friday with Win10 installed on my computer, come in Monday morning and it looks and functions the same as it did Friday, except it's running some version of Mint or Debian or whatever" and everything works perfectly. Anything less, and people (aside from people who know how to use it) aren't gonna wanna switch.
I wish that Windows would work when I boot it up again.
W10 was getting pretty fair, but as usual, Microsoft pushed another dog's breakfast out the door, and W11 is a disaster IMO. DDG'ing Windows 11 is a disaster shows that even Microsoft admits that. So if people are pissed about all the Linux distros, I wonder what they think about the various Windows versions Things like Basic, Home, Pro,Enterprise?
All that said, if a person is pleased with th eWindows experience, I believe they should use it and be
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Agreed, Win11 (regardless of version) is a disaster admittedly... the launch of a new Windows version has a few issues here and there, and a couple large-ish patches usually take care of them... those patches typically aren't used to remove stuff they built into the OS.
WinXP was arguably the best, followed closely with Win7 (probably my favorite).
Tried Win8, less than 5 minutes later, clamped it in the vise on a mill and milled the drive into a pile of chips.
Microsoft suffers the 'every other version is goo
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Agreed, Win11 (regardless of version) is a disaster admittedly... the launch of a new Windows version has a few issues here and there, and a couple large-ish patches usually take care of them... those patches typically aren't used to remove stuff they built into the OS.
WinXP was arguably the best, followed closely with Win7 (probably my favorite). Tried Win8, less than 5 minutes later, clamped it in the vise on a mill and milled the drive into a pile of chips.
Microsoft suffers the 'every other version is good' curse. Hopefully, they learned from what 'the people' said and don't include the AI garbage or Recall crap and get rid of the centered task bar and lower the base requirements a little when they release Win12.
And, if someone prefers *Nix, they're welcome to use it... if it does everything they need, awesome!
And while we are at it, there is the Windows meme of "MacOS has a restricted hardware set, do it's easy for them."
Yet Linux not only works with a lot of different hardware, Linux driver support is much better. Linux has new drivers, plus it doesn't eliminate older ones, like Windows does. I still remember the Windows Vista Driver disaster, which rendered a lot of contemporary equipment useless. And some equipment has been rendered permanently useless like the dual boot systems I was setting up with RS-23
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Because programmers are prissy little ******* who want things exactly their way (remember, I are one too), and Linux is based on a 50 year old concept of how an operating system should be.
So is present day MacOS.
So, there's tons of improvements and changes that can be made to the Unix baseline to bring the system up to 2020's expectations. But anytime you give 100 passionate people open source that needs lots of changes, you end up with 110 different sets of changes. Plus, you have completely disparate sets of users (Developers, Home users, Internet operations, Datacenters, etc) who have orthogonal use cases, so there is a constant tension between changes that are good for one group vs.
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I suspect because Ubuntu, which was once a great base for an OS, has really been hurtling in the wrong direction lately. Given Debian is what Ubuntu is based upon, and given the majority of changes between Ubuntu and Debian are negative, it makes sense for Mint to rebase itself on the more stable OS.
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Rebasing on Debian would make perfect sense. But, they seem to be only Debian curious.
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The Mint distribution based on Debian (LMDE) is not made for productive use (despite being good enough) and the Mint team does not recommend it for that. It has been created to explore the possibility of a Debian-based Mint replacing Ubuntu-based Mint in the eventuality of Ubuntu stopping to be a viable base.
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Your explanation does offer the clarity that was eluding me.
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Ubuntu has made some questionable decisions, and it feels like they aspire to be a large corporate focused OS like RedHat or Microsoft, so the Mint team wants a Plan B if Ubuntu jumps the shark.
I've been meaning to try the Debian based version, but the standard has been working fine.
Betteridges Law of Headlines remains undefeated (Score:2)
For those unfamiliar with it, the law states: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no".
Re: (Score:2)
For those unfamiliar with it, the law states: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no".
Unless we have a headline "Is Betteridge's law wrong?"
Release fast and buggy, or slow and stable (Score:2)
I'd rather not see them release fast and possibly buggy but instead go slow and have a very stable release.
Having been perfecting some expert mode installs with LMDE's live-installer, I'm glad to hear they're doing the same with LM. Consolidating is a win for the devs and the users.
I would like to see some improvements to live-installer's expert modes to allow for fully scriptable installs. I know this isn't like to be the direction the devs are looking for, but I sure would like to have a way to mass roll-
Failing to see the issue. (Score:2)
Again? (Score:2)
Remember this? (Score:2)
Remember this? Conveniently deleted from the record.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
My AMD Mint System will not wake (Score:2)