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> Linux Mint requires users to do a complete re-installation, rather than a rolling incremental update Um, and the author's solution to this is installing Wind

• eropple 15y ago
  I'm sorry, but your post is a little disingenuous. No, Windows doesn't do a rolling release--but, three things that mitigate this: 1) Windows releases are much slower. Most Linux distros have a new-shiny problem: I can't trivially (by which I mean, click a button and emphatically not muck with the command line or PPAs or equivalent user-hatefulness) get the newest OpenOffice or Firefox or Chrome or whatever on an older version of Mint (or Ubuntu--and dist-upgrading Ubuntu is a dicey proposition if you like having a working computer). 2) For the most part (there was some wackiness with architecture changes), Windows will do something much, much closer to the Right Thing on a reinstallation. Your data's where you left it. Your applications are still installed and work. It is not, on Windows, taken for granted that you must pave your machine (yes, I know you can put /home on another partition, that's only part of the problem) in order to upgrade. 3) The idea that you "need to buy new hardware each time you update" Windows is just silly. I have a laptop sitting here. 1GHz Pentium III, 512MB of RAM. I use it for playing old DOS games. It runs Windows 7 a lot more pleasantly than it did XP (which surprised me, but there you go). It may be way more pleasant to use on new hardware, sure--but so is Mint. And by the way--you can set Windows Update to automatically do it when you shut down, and never nag you. (That this isn't the default is probably, on balance, a bad idea, but the capability is trivially there.) Put your hackles down, dude. The mud-slinging helps no one.
  • deno 15y ago
    Fedora does it somewhat better, I think. Run PreUpgrade and reboot into Anaconda, which will do the right thing. At least it seems to be a more fault-proof strategy than dist-upgrade IMO. And of course with BTRFS, you can just make a snapshot right before the process and just roll back should anything go wrong. Of course there isn’t any UI for this yet, but hopefully we’ll get that as well, once Fedora adapts BTRFS as its default FS. Furthermore, the default installation strategy for Fedora is to keep /home on a separate partition or LVM volume, so a complete reinstall is also possible. As to the first point, it always takes some time, but Fedora 16 with latest updates is currently using Linux 3.3, KDE 4.8, Firefox 11 and Eclipse 3.7, so it’s not bad at all. Though Intellij IDEA CE is still on 9.0.
  • readme 15y ago
    > 2) For the most part (there was some wackiness with architecture changes), Windows will do something much, much closer to the Right Thing on a reinstallation. Your data's where you left it. Your applications are still installed and work. It is not, on Windows, taken for granted that you must pave your machine (yes, I know you can put /home on another partition, that's only part of the problem) in order to upgrade. You must not have installed Linux Mint or Ubuntu lately, because they both do this. > 1) Windows releases are much slower. Most Linux distros have a new-shiny problem: I can't trivially (by which I mean, click a button and emphatically not muck with the command line or PPAs or equivalent user-hatefulness) get the newest OpenOffice or Firefox or Chrome or whatever on an older version of Mint (or Ubuntu--and dist-upgrading Ubuntu is a dicey proposition if you like having a working computer). Not sure why this is an issue, because "shiny-new" Linux distributions come out of the box with a quality web browser and LibreOffice, and the versions are always recent enough and updateable. That's more than I can say for Windows, which comes with Internet Explorer and no office software by default, unless you count wordpad, which is clearly not what we are talking about. I understand in an enterprise setting those arguments might not make sense, but in a home-desktop setting, they certainly do.
    • eropple 15y ago
      > You must not have installed Linux Mint or Ubuntu lately, because they both do this. I've installed both recently, thanks. Neither save your system state on a reinstall--or if they do, it's certainly not the default and isn't made clear when you're doing the install. The only acceptable thing is to reinstall and properly reconfigure any user-installed packages when they do a pave-and-reinstall, and while that's nontrivial, it's the only way to deal with the "oh, lol, reinstall everything every six months" clusterfuck in which Linux is currently enmeshed. It seems more likely that nobody will do anything about it and instead we can have even more self-absorbed gnashing about Linux being primed to take over the desktop. Windows, on the other hand, does this by virtue of not screwing with installed software. Loose coupling, believe it or not, has its advantages. > Not sure why this is an issue I think you misunderstand me. In order to get the new and shiny applications, I have to dist-upgrade. Which hilariously and regularly breaks like fucking mad. This means that, no, I can't really stay on an LTS release (and most people won't want to), because to keep up to date, I have to either play Russian roulette with dist-upgrade or...pave the entire thing. Not the case for Windows, which is what I was saying.