Many thanks for your donations and for your support.
Server upgrades
The repository servers were upgraded. They’re now able to serve packages at 10gbps, which is 10 times faster than before.
We no longer observe bottlenecks during large updates when packages such as Firefox or Chromium are updated concurrently.
Upgrade path
The upgrade between Mint 21.3 and 22 was broken last week due to package conflicts introduced upstream in Ubuntu 24.04 on samba and libreoffice.
When Debian unstable was frozen to make the Ubuntu 24.04 package base, Debian was performing a large transition towards new T64 packages. When the 24.04 release was delayed, it was to address the XZ backdoor (all packages had to be recompiled). The package base was also in really bad shape though. A week before it was due, we couldn’t even debootstrap it. Credits to Canonical, by the time 24.04 was released, everything was stable. The transition to T64 wasn’t finished though and so the path from 22.04 to 24.04 was delayed until 24.04.1.
This usually never happens. Post-release the 24.04 package base still needs to catch up with Debian to backport the rest of the T64 transition. Only then can the upgrade path be stable and open. This is really quite complex because the 24.04 base is frozen and stable.. but Debian unstable itself has moved on. The situation is being worked on and addressed upstream by Canonical. It’s getting better and better but regressions can pop in and break the upgrade path at any moment.
Canonical Pauses Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 Upgrade Path Due to Critical Bugs
Now, because the T64 situation was already a problem for the Mint 22 upgrade, it was addressed somehow in our upgrade tool. The 21.3 -> 22 upgrade is able to transition towards T64 packages even when the packaging doesn’t handle the transition. What it can’t do though is get passed actual dependency conflicts.
We’ve been re-testing the upgrade path 3 times since the last blog post. We’ve considered closing it. The situation with libreoffice and samba is now behind us. The upgrade path, as we speak, is functional.
As always and now more than ever though, I’d like to insist on performing system snapshots and data backups prior to any upgrade.
Default Cinnamon theme
Outside of Linux Mint, Cinnamon looks pretty ugly.
In our distribution the focus is on Mint-Y. The default Cinnamon theme is maintained for troubleshooting purposes and rarely gets attention from theme artists.
Ideally, it is the responsibility of the distributions to make things look good. In practice, many do not maintain their own themes, focus on other desktops or insist on using default settings.
To address this problem Cinnamon 6.4 will ship with a much improved default theme.
Maintaining better APT libraries and utilities
One of the big projects for Mint 22.1 is to review our APT dependencies to clean up, rationalize and modernize the tools and libraries we rely on.
APT isn’t just a command line utility. It’s a huge collection of tools and utilities. Think of aptitude, synaptic, gdebi, apturl.
It’s also a set of libraries such as aptdaemon or packagekit which allow many of the software applications we maintain to perform package management.
As you can see in the diagram below, many of our applications use these libraries: The MATE menu, the Cinnamon menu, the driver manager, software manager, software sources, update manager, welcome screen, reports manager, locale and input method configuration tools, backup tool…
Some of these APT tools and libraries were written more than a decade ago and are no longer maintained upstream. Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Debian have been patching them throughout the years so they still work, but their design, their translations, the features they provide are stuck in the past. Every Mint release is a reminder of this and a list of long-lasting paper cuts which we’re unable to address.
Because these utilities and libraries are very important to us we decided to simplify how we use them and to maintain them. Going forward we want perfect translations, no more paper cuts and if something we need is missing we’ll just implement it.
Gdebi and apturl were merged into a single utility application called Captain.
Aptdaemon and mintcommon-aptdaemon were merged into a library called Aptkit.
All the tools which previously used Aptdaemon, Synaptic or apturl will now use Aptkit and Captain.
The tools which use Packagekit don’t necessarily need to transition away from it. Packagekit is actively maintained. It doesn’t provide a set of Gtk3 widgets or translations like Aptkit does, but these tools don’t need them.
All in all, this is a lot of work and you as a user won’t really see much difference on your desktop. The paper cuts are gone though and if you find new ones, this time we’ll be able to fix them.
LMDE 5 EOL
LMDE 5 “Elsie” reached End Of Life and is no longer maintained.
The repositories will continue to work for a while but this release will no longer receive updates from us.
If you are using LMDE 5 please visit the following link to upgrade to LMDE 6:
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4571
Sponsorships:
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