LMDE 6 has been officially released. The big deal about this is that it’s based on the recently released Debian 12 and also that being based on Debian LMDE is 100% community based.
If you’ve been disappointed by what the Linux corporations have been doing lately or don’t like the all-snap future that Ubuntu has opened, then this is the distro for you.
I’m running it as my daily driver and it works exactly like the regular Mint so you don’t lose anything. Clem and team have done a great job, even newbies could use Debian now.
Personally I think LMDE is the future of Linux as Ubuntu goes it’s own way, and this is a good thing for Mint and the Linux community. Let’s get back to community distros and move away from the corps.
EDIT: LMDE is 64bit only. There is no 32bit option.
Flatpak is more mature than you’d think. It also seen more adoption than Wayland (not exactly apples to apples…).
Immutable concept may not be new, but the current implementations are. Even the pioneers such as NixOS, Fedora, and openSUSE are still ironing out quirks as we are having this discussion. Even NixOS, the current top leading, is having performance issues.
Linux Mint have snapshot system. It is not perfect (certainly won’t beat immutables), but ot certainly works well for its use cases. Once again, being the latest and greatest is never its use case.
Flatpaks lack:
- plugin support (Audio stuff, Video)
- drag & drop xdg portal
- “share” xdg portal
- local networking (KeepassXC, KDE Connect, KDE Plasma Integration, this citing program)
- persisting portals (this is huge, there is no GUI way to allow the Flatpak to perma-access certain locations like on Android)
- good minimalist runtimes, not needing 7GB of them
- a package manager in the container
They are already better in
- cross-distro app support
- official application adoptions
- installing crappy browsers at your system without any nonfree repos (Edge, Chrome, Opera, …)
- being user-maneagable
- container stuff: listing, managing, updating, copying resetting (just remove the user appfolder)
- having GUI permission settings (better than SELinux, Apparmor, firejail)
- …
Never heard of performance issues of immutable OSes. Why should there be.
- updates slowing down the system in the background
- binaries, no custom compiled software (normal in all regular repos apart arch or gentoo)
- needing to wait when installing new software to your main system (something nonexistent on Android and iOS since forever, so this layering could be completely removed on for example ChromeOS)
Linux mints shapshotting works for avoiding errors that happened in between two versions of the OS, during a single update.
If the issue happened over time, or you already updated two times with the error, its useless.
Rpm-ostree allows to:
- install apps to your system
- update all the system apps according to the git repo and your layers
- reset the OS to the exact image of another OS or itself in fresh form
- allows to monitor exactly the changes you did to the current system.
I think a well-managele system could and should also be possible to do without all that image-creation. Having two seperate systems is not needed if you know exactly whats the difference between your two images.
Wayland probably has more things it lacks. Again, it’s not apples to apples comparison.
The performance is more toward manipulating system packages. Since it’s not supposed to be changed, a new system image tends to get created everytime user makes modification. At least that’s the issue with Nix.
While that rpm-ostree sounds nice, it is not required for Linux Mint’s use case.
Yeah, I don’t think Linux Mint is for you… Perhaps NixOS would fit you better.
Don’t get me wrong, I am interested in the prospect of immutable systems. I just don’t think it is a silver bullet for every problem out there.
I think Wayland is the future. In fact, I’ve been using it as a daily driver. However, it’s still a long way to go until it can truly replace X11. For starter, it has some issues that can be dealbreaker for some people (having all the applications terminated upon crash is one). Also, XFCE, MATE, and all the others got some catching up to do.
You may have your opinion, but there are reasons those two features are not as widely adopted (yet?).
I am already on Fedora Kinoite. Not sure if their immutability model is actually suited for rolling Distros though:
- OS packages are traced by OSTree
- updates come from another repo using OSTree (afaik). So you have a “wanted” “vanilla Fedora KDE” image on their servers, and your client has older packages, downloads just the diffs
- the OS does atomic updates. I guess this can’t be done differently. Updating works fully in the background, a new system image is built. If you dont like it,
sudo ostree admin cleanup 0. Btw wheel can do rpm-ostree stuff without a password prompt. - when rebooting, without any second of delay, you boot into the updated system. In grub you can see both options though, if you something may break
- as the system is image based, you can rebase to any other system images. These are like Docker/Podman images.
Its a really superior technology and the best overall solution. I was mind experimenting with an only traced system that is not immutable but uses OSTree to manage updates. Only when something breaks you would create a new clean image, or rebase. As most updates work normally since forever.
Because in the process of generating the image, locally the complete OS is build on every update. Not downloaded. But copied etc. This takes a lot of resources, which works fine on monthly updates like on Android, but not so well on daily rolling updates.
To “Linux mint does not require OStree”. Rpm-ostree or apt-ostree not. But ostree I think yes. It may be stable and all, but what if its not? And you dont want to reinstall everything? There needs to be a way to reset the system to work again. All rpm-ostree does is remove “it works on my machine though” bugs. Its the only thing newcomers should use.
You are not meant to add tons of RPMs to your system, but you can. Updates can be done in the background, no problem. So you could literally “layer” (thats what its called) any huge piece of software, that doesnt work locally. You can add proprietary drivers, install media codecs and all.
Various ways to make media playback work on RPM Firefox
Ublue really shows the potential of rpm-ostree. Use Fedora as base, to kernel mods, layerings, replacements how you like, and ship the “working out of the box” image for exactly your hardware. Its brilliant.
