| https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Mint-Security-EOL I know this is old news by now but many of the linux mint users decide not to update their systems for some reason. So my question is how up-to-date is your system. If you are using a rolling release distro then the question is moot. My question is more towards those who use point release distros like Mint or Ubuntu. If I have to be completely honest i am guilty of this as well since i am still running ubuntu 20.04 focal fossa but it is not that old tbh. what do you think? and should programs like unattended-updates debian have allowed by default on distros? i dont want any programs updating anything behind my back i just don't like something devouring my bandwidth for no reason actually. i also think you don't need the absolute latest kernel if you don't get the latest hardware all the time. what is your take? |
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| Are you asking about updating distro versions, like from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04, or just package updates in general? I think that you are talking about package updates, so I will answer that. I like the unattended-updates idea, the only reason why I even installed Mint on my mother's computer when she lives so far away is exactly because I can just turn the unattended-updates on and have her with the latest security patches without having to do anything. About my update schedule, I update my home server that is running Armbian (Ubuntu edition) about twice a week, something like every 3 or 4 days, and my website that is running on Ubuntu once a week. My PC is a rolling release, so I update every day. |
| I tend to use rolling distros. Used to update sometimes daily or multiple times a day, but often on Guix System the updates can be a bit slow. They push out packages even before their build server has built them, so occasionally something big/slow starts compiling on my PC like ungoogled-chromium or qtwebengine which can be really annoying as it would take over 24 hours in some cases if I let it finish. If I wait a bit longer for the build server to catch up then I can just get a "substitute" aka prebuilt binary of it. Also occasionally a package is actually broken and fails to build. So rather than rushing into things I do upgrades once every 1-3 weeks or so now usually, once I'm mentally prepared. Luckily guix supports partial upgrades and rollbacks, so I can skip stuff that's gonna take forever to build or that's broken and just upgrade the rest, and if something I upgraded seems buggy I can roll back the whole upgrade and then redo it while skipping the buggy thing. Still, it can be a bit involved to deal with all that. Plus if I find something broken there's a chance I'm the first one to notice it so then I feel obligated to submit a bug report to the mailing list with my build log attached showing the failure. I'll also say that on servers I tend to not upgrade as often as I do on desktop since sometimes things get a little wonky/broken if you upgrade without restarting everything and I usually want a server to keep running a long time. So I'll do upgrades if I was planning to reboot anyway, or if a power outage or something made it reboot anyway then I'll do upgrades and reboot it again. Oddly I don't feel forced to reboot on Guix System very often, but I've run into a lot of things on my server running Arch that made me reboot. I definitely don't like to avoid updates and stay on old stuff. I know some people actually hate updates (like Windows 7 users) and associate them with problems and insist their stuff works fine as-is. I like my stuff to be up-to-date when possible. I like to have a new kernel even if I'm not getting new hardware. My main machine is a ThinkPad T440p from the early 2010s. Often it helps performance and fixes bugs. I think recently they did something with CPU schedulers and changed the default to something that should be more performant. I agree I don't want things updating behind my back, though. If I decide to manually update and it breaks stuff, at least I feel partially responsible and I knew the risk was there and I know to work on fixing it. Things happening automatically in the background and then potentially breaking sound like a way to make you lose your mind. It would probably not even feel like it was your computer anymore. I don't run Ubuntu or similar on anything I use a whole lot, but if I booted up some laptop I didn't use much and saw it had an old Ubuntu version, I would probably run updates on it right away. There's also the issue to consider of having the latest updates from your distro but the distro package being behind. Occasionally I'll see a package I'm using is a couple months behind because the package maintainer hasn't updated it lately. This gets annoying if you're reporting bugs and they start insisting you upgrade, but it's mostly out of your control. I guess the solution is to help maintain the packages you use for your distro, but that's a whole new thing to learn and deal with then. A while back I noticed that dolphin-emu was broken on guix and I managed to find a newer commit that fixed the issue that was present on the currently packaged version. I got someone else to then update the package for the whole distro to that newer commit. It's still a bit of an old version but at least it works now. I think to use the latest version it would be a more involved process of tweaking the package recipe because dependencies had changed, like using a newer Qt version than before. For mnor package upgrades you can often just change the commit and url in the package file to get the newer version. You can often do this yourself to get a newer version of something than the distro ships. |
| I'm that guy who updates their system and packages each 1-3 days or each week when I'm using metered connection. As for distro release, I tend to like Fedora model: offers quite/slightly up-to-date release but stable, and not brick user's machine. Whenever a distro release a system upgrade (like Fedora 38 → 39), I'll upgrade ASAP whenever I have free time. Tho, I know that there's some distro that offers automatic system upgrade—afaik Vanilla OS did this? tried but I instantly hopped back to Fedora due to unknown issue happened on my netbook—or package manager like snap, I still like and prefer the idea that user must know beforehand about packages and system components to be upgraded/installed, so automatic upgrade is beyond my scope lol. If I want only handful of packages to not get updated during upgrade, then i just can pin it, no biggies. Then again, this is really rare case for me to pin package As for my bot server.... well.... i keep it as is until I need to pull commits kek, so the server sometimes get updated each 2 weeks or less, since the bot didn't need that much š¤· |
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Reply to Sasbyek
Are you asking about updating distro versions, like from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04, or just package updates in general? I think that you are talking about package updates, so I will answer that.
I like the unattended-updates idea, the only reason why I even installed Mint on my mother's computer when she lives so far away is exactly because I can just turn the unattended-updates on and have her with the latest security patches without having to do anything.
About my update schedule, I update my home server that is running Armbian (Ubuntu edition) about twice a week, something like every 3 or 4 days, and my website that is running on Ubuntu once a week. My PC is a rolling release, so I update every day.
I like the unattended-updates idea, the only reason why I even installed Mint on my mother's computer when she lives so far away is exactly because I can just turn the unattended-updates on and have her with the latest security patches without having to do anything.
About my update schedule, I update my home server that is running Armbian (Ubuntu edition) about twice a week, something like every 3 or 4 days, and my website that is running on Ubuntu once a week. My PC is a rolling release, so I update every day.
| @Sasbyek i was talking about version updates. I update my packages religiously but upgrading to a new lts version is a whole different thing. I just don't see the reason yes i want some software available for newer versions of Ubuntu but not that much so i didnt update to 22.04 yet |
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| I update it when I notice it's needed, otherwise as long as it's running fine, thenI don't mind being a little behind the times. |
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