[DISCUSSION] Linux Mint

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I'm waiting until several weeks after the official upgrade of Ubuntu 24.04.1 comes out to make my second (and last) attempt at upgrading. LM 22 is the first release of LM that I haven't been able to upgrade from without major issues. It's not like I have tons of "foreign packages" installed or ppa's either. VirtualBox, LibreOffice, NVidia drivers, dark mode across many apps - just broken after this "upgrade". The Internet is littered with issues with upgrading to LM22 from LM 21.3 and it's underlying rot, Ubuntu 24.04. For now, like many others, I'll be sticking with 21.3 until I can figure out the best path forward, which may be to ditch LM for good after nine years. (If I'm going to fresh install, I might as well switch to a rolling distro that doesn't require a fresh install every two years.)

 

it is true that i had upgrading troubles too. the upgrade was looking for some deleted timeshift stuff, and when i tried to continue it invented some new problem,- i forget which- so i gave up.for now it works, it still gets new kernel upgrades, and i may be long dead by the time an upgrade becomes inevitable, after all.i wasted more than enough time on windose, so i just
wont bother with ubuntu.

 

i must confess that i have no experience at all with using timeshift, for the simple reason that mint/ubuntu never crashed.but i have long list of irritations with it.
once you have a stable operating system running, and decent backups,it is overkill to put some heavy-duty software in place to restore from disasters. it is
not as if you are running something from microsoft.

 

I use the default settings and back up once a month with just two Snapshots saved, the bare minimum. I have used Timeshift perhaps twice in donkeys years but I consider it worth having. When, if ever I carry out a fresh installation I will go for the BTRFS method, but for now I will leave things as they are.

 

Since upgrading from 21.3 to 22 I have had an Nvidia driver problem and a similar issue with the CPU of my PC, both problems are due to the new Kernel, both pieces of hardware are no longer supported. Switching "upgrading" to LMDE fixed both problems due to the older Kernel shipped with it. The Nouveau driver works but the picture and text are not as sharp causing eye strain and headaches with extended use.

The only symptom with the CPU was System Reports constantly popping up saying there was an issue needing attention although giving no clue as to what the issue was. A little digging came up with the CPU compatibility entry.

I am finding Linux very frustrating these days, the selling point for me was always its compatibility with old hardware, this seems to have ended. My PC is a five year old i5 PC with 8gig of RAM and the most basic Nvidia card, the card is still on sale and I could probably find the same "new" boxed CPU online in a few minutes, not an old machine in my view.

There is no point installing any other Ubuntu based OS as they all appear to be shipping with the same Kernel, its probably only Debian and Debian based distros that are not charging ahead and shipping with the latest Kernel.

LMDE 6 for me at present.

 

my old desktop is still on 21.3. i decided against upgrading because it was too much hassle for me.the kernel is supported till april 2027. long enough for me, i may not even live to see that.
i had no idea that i could run into compatibility problems,although i would never touch nvidia with a barge pole. previous experience taught me that much, at least.
and i have a recent lappy that runs LMDE 6 flawlessly. i guess rhat will last me long enough. but thanks for the warning.
and i dislike `upgrading` for the sake of it anyway; people should be wiser if they do not use cutting edge technology, imho.

 

You should be able to still install and run an older LTS kernel directly from within Mint.

 

all well and good; i think we all know that here; but of course when you upgrade, you do not want a downward trajectory..

 

I have moved on from one release to another since this PC was just a few months old, just upgrading, never a fresh install as far as I can recall, hardly a problem in that time. The issues I have had are disappointing but a fresh start was well overdue. I have run LMDE in the past on my laptop and found it to be a solid OS, switching my main PC across to LMDE6 was an easy decision, although I did briefly consider MX and Spiral. As the latest Ubuntu and by extension Mint are based on/built around this latest Kernel, moving back to an older release could well break something else. LMDE6 is up and running fine, the only drawback is the short period of support, just two years.

Regarding the Nvidia card, with a tower PC the only choice seems to be Nvidia or Radeon, is Radeon any better these days? My Laptop has its Intel graphic chip and I have a little Beelink PC by the TV with its built in graphics, neither ever give me any trouble. Gaming is a curse, I wish people would just buy consoles.

 

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i did not like MX very much; all very well documented, and everything works, but it was that interface that put me off. sooo ugly.... maybe i am still too much of a noob in linux to know how to get rid of that and simply run cinnamon. and i do not care to bother with themes too much; [ i suspect they eat resources.and i happen to like how it looks out of the box.] and i have my doubts about LTS anyway; there is bound to be a follow-up when it expires and i can simply use that with a simple upgrade. without having to format my disk. as long as they do not bungle it. by asking for the presence of a timeshift snapshot, for instance. but that is just my two cents and my subjective preferences.that is the good thing about using linux; if you use windose then you are stuck with one taste, and one brand of maffia; when you use linux you have hundreds of choices.

 

By the way, MX has a brother that specifically targets old and ancient hardware - antiX Linux. Just as a note.

 

hm. my machines are not that old; all can use x64. oldest machine here is a lenovo lappy with 2 GB ram. but it is painfully slow when running MX.

 

Q4OS or perhaps Bodhi are the most friendly to low spec machines in my experience. Having said that I am usually disappointed with the outcome when I install most these "light weight" distros, any difference in performance is usually marginal. 4GB of ram is probably the minimum required these days, 16GB seems to be the norm with the new kit I am presently looking at. If that's whats being fitted that's what developers will expect to have available for their latest product be it the software we run or the web pages we visit, so bloody depressing, I would be all for it if I could see/experience any benefit but I don't.

 

yes, it all tends to escalate beyond the affordable.there is a tendency to upgrade that is downright sick. you can, so you do. and exactly that becomes the new norm.people ought to count to ten before they upgrade, i guess. if a distro needs an alien chip that is not on ones`mobo, people should not even try to install it, imho.[ call me a conservative dinosaur whenever you like.]

 

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