Mint Vanessa

[Ed P]

The current issue of ElReg is effusive in its praise for Mint’s LTS Vanessa beta.

I’ll confess that I do not like LTS versions because they put stability ahead of security. In other words they deliberately lag behind new Linux kernel releases. Although this attitude used to be appropriate we now see new CPU side-channel attacks coming out at regular intervals. A two years old kernel just does not cut it.

If however you look beyond El Regs praise for things Green, you will note that most of the praise comes for Red Hat’s FlatPak repository and the way its containerized sand-boxed apps open the world of Linux to wider app choices free from dependency hell.. However, Flatpak is not confined to either Redhat or Mint, but can fairly easily be installed in Ubuntu or any other Debian distro through the method disclosed in this article>

[Ed P]

Having ‘bad-mouthed’ Mint’s kernel policy, there is an easy way to install the release version of Mint Vanessa and make sure that the kernel remains updated.

Follow the steps given here to use Mint’s update manager to perform the task.

link

I have yet to have any kernel update in Mint unduly effect its operation. In general kernel updates never get released into the repository without going through rigorous checks in Debian Spike, and Ubuntu. On the other hand Linux exploits are becoming much more common and sophisticated.

 

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