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.
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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.
But that’s the thing, I (and together with me many others) have already been doing this for a couple of years now. Granted, this is on another distro*. But I honestly don’t know why it wouldn’t be possible on Debian; perhaps (some of) the groundwork has already been put into place 😉.
Which distro would that be that does seamless major release upgrades?
Fedora Atomic and its derivatives (like Bazzite and its uBlue-siblings). I wouldn’t be surprised if the same applies to NixOS and other (paradigm-wise/philosophically-)related projects.
Hm, immutable distros change the game quite a bit. I don’t see how Debian could match that without introducing an immutable version of Debian, so it’s not really something that the people in charge of the upgrade process can solve.