Because for most use cases, Mint works flawlessly. It changes little from time to time. It has all the drivers to get started with a wide range of common hardware. It has all the codecs to play common media formats.
Of course if the package update is too slow, it’s not for you, but then unlike you, most people don’t need the latest and greatest. They just need something that works from the get-go with predictable behavior.
These days, AFAIK network boot is done thru initramfs. It loads rootfs in most cases I’ve seen tho.
What machine do you have for this?
Is it better than PinePhone?
From what I read on the wiki, they’re mostly testing the mainline kernel. I wonder how the device support would be with vendor downstream kernel.
I happen to have a Fairphone 4. It’s listed as supported, but not with all its features.
Anyone here tried PostmarketOS on Fairphone 4?
Makes me wonder if a 3rd party server for this is ever a thing.
Wow, I didn’t know Canonical apologist is a thing.
Been using KDE since Debian 9. I’d say it’s stable enough.
Not Debian-based, but Debian. With KDE.
OP said it’s been running fine until recently, so I doubt it’s the kernel.
I dont think that app interfaces should break between releases?
If they have good reason, they totally should! In fact this is pretty common.
One prominent example would be how runtime files for PostgreSQL & MySQL are incompatible between major version. E.g. if you’re to upgrade from postgres 11 to 12, you’ll need to do migration.
A lot of command line programs change their default behaviors, deprecate options, etc. This may not be so for coreutils (cp, mv, ls, ln, et al.), but for the more actively developed programs.
In the end, it might not be complete bad to have rolling release on servers, but in most case, it’s not worth the headache.
AFAIK, the Linux codebase is actually open source in its entirety. However it has parts that are capable of loading non-free stuff like firmware. The linux-libre project makes sure those parts are disabled.
Personally, I think it’s a fool’s errand as it would render most modern systems unusable (in the reasonable sense).
They also don’t apply such harsh judgement to firmware that resides in ROM, and only to firmware updates. In most of these cases you’d have systems with outdated firmwares with neither QoL nor security updates.
Here’s something to get you started.
Don’t take my word for it, tho. Do your own research as well!
Updates tend to be an issue, especially when it comes to changes in application interfaces. We’ll never know what would break after a major update.
This is why point release distro remains the majority in enterprise world.
Perhaps immutable distros are there to provide that continuous update while having the ability to rollback.
Mainly a Debian user, but have used CentOS at times. Quite informed on the happening as well.
CentOS 9 was doing quite well until Red Hat shortened its lifetime. Red Hat also called the FOSS community a bunch of “freeloaders”.
I think the consensus these days is to use Alma Linux or Rocky Linux for enterprise stuff.
Speaking of stable, Debian and Ubuntu LTS easily provide 5 years support. Both Alma & Rocky picked up where CentOS 9 left off.
It’s ironic that CentOS Stream (specifically the killing of old CentOS for the sake of it) is what made Enterprise Linux sucks in the first place.
Yeah, it’s known to not play nice with dhcpcd. I’ve been using nm’s built-in dhcp client. Otherwise dhclient’s been known to work. Not sure about the wpa_supplicant part as it never cause me any issue by itself.
It usually has something to do with programming. Again, most cases, the versions in the packages included in your garden variety stable distros should cover most use cases.
However, once in a while one would encounter the need of using the cutting edge features on certain compiler or interpreter. Rust comes to mind. I know Python introduced some features that could drastically alter workflow (e.g. switch statement). NodeJS is another one known to be lagging behind from time to time.
In other cases, hardware support might be taken to consideration, especially for newer machines. However, with Mint including the optional newer kernel, it shouldn’t be a problem.