Why the need for New Version updates?

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[Charlie]

Linux Mint has the ability to update itself and of all its programs via the Update & Software Managers, and can even get new Kernel updates via the Update Manager.  Why then is support stopped for what they consider older “Versions”, and making it necessary to “upgrade” to a new Version every 4 or 5 years?

Please excuse my asking, but to me it doesn’t seem necessary.  Why would Linux Mint want to mimic Microsoft in this manner?

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

• This topic was modified 3 months, 1 week ago by Charlie.

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The update strategy is most likely driven by the lifecycle of the underlying Ubuntu distro. I just updated a Linux mint 20.1 system to 21. First there was a minor update from 20.1 to 20.3 followed by a major update from 20.3 to 21. All went smoothly. The kernel used in 20.3 reaches its end of support next month and I was pleased that the update from 20.3 to 21 handled that issue automatically. Considering how well things worked out I’m considering performing another major upgrade to the next available LTS release of Mint.

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Charlie

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So it sounds as if these “lifecycles” are programmed into Ubuntu (and therefore Mint) kernels.  The only reason I can think of for doing this is to keep up with newer hardware and technology.  I guess regular updates just don’t cut it, and they have to come out with a whole new Version.  Too bad, Linux Mint would be perfect if this was not the case.

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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It’s not just the kernel. Other aspects of Mint are also updated. And during a major upgrade new packages are installed for just about everything.

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Bill C., Charlie

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Well, even though these new version updates are required every five years, for me and many others, Linux is great to use and easy to do regular updates on.  I’m that way that when I find something good that works great, I don’t like to see it changed without good reason.  Thanks again.

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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Well, I’ve been tweaking (or trying to tweak) parts of LMC 22 to look more like LMC 20 which I’ve really liked from the start.  Two things are giving me a fit trying to improve them back to LMC 20 style:

1.  Is there a way to change the smallish font in the Nemo file explorer?  Even though the font is still Ubuntu Regular 10, it doesn’t look the same.

2.  Is there a way to increase the size of the font in the pop up descriptive text when you hover over a Panel item?

I’m not getting younger and tiny fonts are not my favorite things.  I think I’ve managed to change or remove all of the other stuff they’ve either added or changed from the way it was in LMC 20.  One thing that really got on my nerves was that Notification applet in the Panel that kept telling me I had Notifications, even after they had gone off the screen!  Fortunately I found that if I deleted that Notification applet it was gone.  I must say I’m not looking forward to this hassle again even though LMC 22 works well otherwise.  Any help with those two items above would be most appreciated!

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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Go to Settings/Panel, Panel appearance, Font size

Right click on Notification icon and choose ‘Remove Notifications’ (which apparently you did), OR left click and choose Notifications Settings and then toggle Enable Notifications to Off.

Settings/Appearance/Font Selection; should do it if I understand what you want.

Maybe you do this but if not, keep a log of changes you make, especially if the changes are important to/for you. You never know when it will come in handy.

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Charlie

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I’ve done some fooling around with the font settings, but I think I’ll have to do more experimenting with the Font Scaling Factor in Font Settings and maybe also try different fonts to get what I want.  The point is that I didn’t have to do all this with LMC 20, it had good fonts right “out of the box” so to speak.  I only had to change the font in Text Editor.  Good idea keeping a log of what I’ve done!

Edit:  I forgot to mention that I’m using the same computer, monitor, and resolution.

 

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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DrBonzo

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Somewhere out there someone is saying “LMC 22 is perfect right out of the box. I haven’t changed a thing. Why didn’t they make LMC 20 like this?”

That’s not a shot at you. The LMC developers had to make certain choices. Some people will love the choices, some will hate them, and the rest will be somewhere between those two extremes.

All things considered, though, I’ll take LMC over Windows or macOS. For me LMC really does “just work”, unlike the other two OSs.

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Charlie

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Yeah, you’re right.  The things I’m complaining about are “small potatoes” in comparison.

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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DrBonzo

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Sorry to be back but I have a real problem worth complaining about now.  My recently installed Linux Mint Cinnamon 22 ran fine for a while but has now started doing Cinnamon Crashes frequently.  Now it doesn’t even boot up without doing a Cinnamon crash.  Restarts don’t help so I click on No and then do a Restart, and then it boots and runs okay, at least for a while.  I never had this problem with LMC 20!

Has anyone else had a problem like this?  I’ve got 4 Gigs of memory on the computer and I don’t push it hard.  Linux says LMC 22 will run on 2 Gigs, and better on 4 Gigs.  Swap file is on too.

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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Remind me again what hardware you’re running; SSD or HDD, processor, age, etc.

Have you made any changes in hardware and/or software before the crashes started?

How full is your swap file? How much memory are you using? (Go to Start/Administration/System Monitor. In the Resources tab Memory and Swap are right next to each other about 2/3 down the window.

On my daily driver (Dell Inspiron 3558, 500GB HDD, 4GB RAM, new in April 2016), I noticed that as the day went on, the amount of used memory increased and so did the swap. If the swap got too big the computer would sometimes freeze on Shutdown and I’d have to press and hold the power key for a few seconds to force a shutdown. After I removed the 4GB RAM and replaced it with 16 GB RAM (maxed out for the computer), the problem cleared up. Even when it did shut down normally (which it usually did) I noticed the computer got somewhat “gummy” before upgrading the RAM.

I think that with each successive version of Mint, the need to handle newer hardware comes at the expense of eliminating support for some older hardware. I have a 2009 Gateway netbook with 1 GB RAM and an Intel Atom processor. It simply will not run any Mint version after 20, whether it’s Cinnamon, Mate, or XFCE. That’s not proof of my contention, but I’ve also seen comments on various Linux and Mint forums, that indicate some older hardware is not being supported.

You may also have a failing drive. Check its status by going to Start/Accessories/Disks. In the left panel select your Drive, then in the three vertical dot menu (forget what that’s called) select Smart data & self tests. You may not understand all the entries (I don’t either) but at least look at the upper right for Self Test, Self Assessment, and Overall Assessment. Don’t worry if you see a bunch of “Old Age” and “Pre-Fail” in the lower panel; every drive I’ve ever had in a Mint machine, whether its a 9 year old HDD or a brand new SSD, has had those in almost every row.

Or you may just have a corrupt installation. Bummer, but probably easily enough fixed. Save your data now just in case!

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Charlie

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I bought a new Samsung 870 EVO, 1 Terabyte SSD to put the LMC 22 on and it is mounted on a 2″ bracket that has an older but identical SSD on it that still runs LMC 20.  Other than that no changes have been made to this computer.  The CPU is an Intel Core i3-2120, 3.30 GHz x 2 virtualised to 4 cores, and is 12.5 years old.  System Monitor shows all 4 cores.

I’m using from 900 MB to 1 GB of 3.5 GB of memory showing in System Monitor.  Swap file starts out at zero, and eventually gets up to between 29 to 30 MB.  When I did the LMC 22 install the program recognized all of my hardware, and when I ran Driver Manager it said my computer didn’t need any drivers.  As I said, the LMC 22 ran fine for around ten days before this problem.  I’m thinking that it may be my fault with all the experimenting and tweaking I did that I messed something up.  I had gotten it very close to looking like LMC 20 though and it still ran okay, but, with just an occasional Cinnamon crash.

Thank goodness my wife suggested I get a new SSD for the LMC 22, and keep the LMC 20 on its own SSD which I’m using now.  Thanks for replying, I know I’m being a pita, but I just never had this before.

Edit:  When the LMC 22 runs, there is no “gummyness” at all.

 

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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If I understand correctly, at the moment you have the 20 SSD AND the 22 SSD installed in the computer at the same time? I wonder what would happen if you removed the 20 SSD and put the 22 SSD in it’s place. In other words I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with the 22 SSD installation – loose connector, etc.

You’re using less RAM and have a smaller Swap than I did before I went from 4 to 16 GB RAM. I found 16 GB RAM for $16. Might be worth it if you can find a good deal on RAM.

Did you keep track of the experimenting you did when you tweaked 22?

Have you updated recently? I’m looking at available updates that have accumulated on my computer over the last week and there are microcode and firmware updates. They just might fix something.

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Crashes are usually hardware related, or a buggy driver in Windows. Any joy in the error logs?
More info here.

cheers, Paul

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Charlie, DrBonzo

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Logs are no longer in the default installation of LMC 22. To get them open a terminal and type in “sudo apt install gnome-logs” without the quotes, then Enter. You should then be able to access the logs by Start/Administration/Logs. They aren’t the easiest thing in the world to make sense of, unfortunately.

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Yes, there are loads of them, and most of what they say I can’t understand.  But I’ll keep looking at them.  I got quite an accumulation of Crash error logs!  Really wish I could make some sense out of those.

 

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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DrBonzo wrote:

If I understand correctly, at the moment you have the 20 SSD AND the 22 SSD installed in the computer at the same time? I wonder what would happen if you removed the 20 SSD and put the 22 SSD in it’s place.

Yes I have is the two SSD’s mounted in the computer, but only one is connected at a time, and I use the same power and same main first data cable.  It may seem unusual but I disconnect one to run the other.

I took screen shots of all the system settings windows from 20 and tried to match them in 22.  No, I didn’t keep track unfortunately.

Yes I have updated and I’m glad you mentioned that because there was a large 550 MB update with microcode and some other things that made me wonder if I should let it install, but I did, along with some other small updates.  It seems like the problem started after that but I’m not jumping to any conclusions.  When I Googled the problem, there were many hits from people with the same problem.  It can be caused by a lot of different things from what I read.

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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I’ve decided to try restoring a Timeshift save point I made earlier right after I had gotten LMC 22 pretty much the way I wanted it.  I hope I made it before I did the Linux update with the big file.  If that doesn’t work then I’ll have to do a re-install and start all over.  This time I will go through all the Update Manager’s updates and not let it install the latest kernel or the big update.  I checked the most recent kernels including the one I have active with the Bug Checker and they’re all really full of bugs!  I’ll do as I’ve always done and pick the kernel with the least amount of bugs.

As far as keeping track of what I did — I don’t like the Modern Menu and Panel icons which is all you get with Mint-Y-Dark so I switched the Theme to Linux MInt to get the Traditional.  I also added Screenshot and Text Editor icons to the left side of the Panel.  I removed the Corner thing all way to the far right of the Panel.  There were other things I clicked on mainly because I didn’t know what they were for and I can’t remember all of them.

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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Where is the Bug Checker you refer to? I’ve not run into that before. I’m curious whether the bugs are verified bugs (i.e., widespread, affecting a lot of users) or isolated issues that perhaps only one or just a handful of users have reported.

I’d be careful about picking a kernel that’s too old. I think it would be more likely that an older kernel would have unpatched security vulnerabilities. I’d be extra cautious surfing around (and I’d be extra cautious surfing around when using LMC 20).

If you end up re-installing I’d go all the way back starting with a new download and new installation usb stick.

FWIW I installed the big firmware and microcode updates last night on my daily driver and on a 2009 Acer with 4GB RAM and 480 GB SSD. Haven’t noticed any adverse effects.

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Charlie

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One other thing you might try is to use a bootable usb flash drive to boot and then run the computer from that instead of the installed version on your SSD. If you still get crashes then you know it’s not your installation on the SSD that’s causing problems. Use a new usb flash drive with a freshly burned iso that’s also a fresh download. Just be aware that running from a flash drive will be a good bit slower than running from an SSD, so don’t let slowness fake you into thinking something is necessarily wrong; you’re looking to see if there are crashes.

If you do have trouble running from the flash drive, I would suspect your Intel cpu might be too old.

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Charlie

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DrBonzo wrote:

Where is the Bug Checker you refer to? I’ve not run into that before. I’m curious whether the bugs are verified bugs (i.e., widespread, affecting a lot of users) or isolated issues that perhaps only one or just a handful of users have reported.

In Update Manager,  click on View, then go down and click on Linux Kernels.  Click okay to the question that pops up.  Pick one of the kernels and left click on it, you should get this:

Then click on the blue Bug Reports and you should get this:

This is the report on the kernel that I’m currently using on LMC 20.  As you can see, it’s free of bugs.  When I did this with LMC 22, all of the newest kernels had from 3 to 12 bugs!  When I do pick one, it will be the newest one that has the least amount of bugs.

Concerning the running of LMC 22 from the flash drive, I’ve already done that for a few hours checking things out before I did the install.  Aside from being slower, it ran fine.

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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DrBonzo

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Thanks. I’d never noticed the bug report link before.

So it sounds like when you run 22 from the SSD you get crashes more frequently than “a few hours”, which is the amount of time you ran 22 off the flash drive. If so, then I’d say something went wrong in the installation to the SSD. It’s interesting, though, that the download I used to install to my HDD had the 6.8.0-38 kernel on it, which in addition to being pretty old still has 21 bugs listed for it! I don’t think they change the file you download very often so I’ll bet that’s the same kernel that was on your flash drive. If it’s a kernel problem you could try the earlier kernels until you find the one that causes the crashes. That would get pretty tedious so I’d probably just try a fresh installation.

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Thanks for all of your help and patience DrBonzo.  I will post any progress or success in this topic when it happens.  I was so happy and relieved when LMC 22 ran well after the initial install.  I should have taken my time and not tried to change things so much.  This problem is most likely my fault.  I started out learning with LMC 17 on a laptop my brother loaned me.  I then obtained a ca. 2007 Sony VAIO laptop that I installed LMC 19.1 on from a DVD my brother made for me.  From there I went to LMC 20 which I put on the then new first Samsung SSD on my main daily use desktop, again from a DVD my brother made for me in 2021.

The LMC 19.1 and 20 are still running okay in spite of all the experimenting I did with them.  I just assumed 22 would do the same.  Never assume anything anymore.

 

Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.

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DrBonzo

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My experience with macOS, Windows, and LM is that the more I tweak them the more likely it is for something to get messed up. It shouldn’t be like that since if an OS is giving you the option of changing something it ought to work. If it doesn’t work it’s because of some combination of the following (IMHO) 1) increased incompetence of programmers, 2) managers not giving programmers enough time to do things correctly because of the rush to get the next “wallet scraper” out, and 3) an OS that has so many add-ons that additional add-ons and modifications require a Rube Goldberg approach that is much more likely to fail.

In any case I try to adapt to the OS rather than get the OS adapted to me. But then I’m lucky that I can see small fonts, etc. so I typically don’t need to change much.

That’s probably more than enough ranting. Keep us posted on how things go.

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