u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs

Many of you have a well running Mint22 installs, and for most of you there is little point in tearing that up to try LMDE. But if you are reinstalling for fresh installing for the first time, consider LMDE.

As Mint22 moves into its third year it seems to be getting a little rough around the edges, in the past the reliability difference between LMDE and Mint was difficult to quantify, both having high reliability. But lately a schism is forming in the “it just works” department.

The Ubuntu security repository has repeatedly gone down, 2025 2026

If you left the venerable default LTS 6.8 kernel and got on the Ubuntu HWE path it eventually lead many of you to Kernel panics in kernel 7.0.0-28

And now AMD Navi21 (6xxx) GPU firmware issues.

These all flow from upstream Ubuntu. None touched LMDE. All of these issues have a work around, and Mint22 is still quite serviceable but lately it does seem to be taking uptime away from many users.

Abnormal release Timing: Early in even years Canonical takes Debian Sid, the unstable development branch of Debian, Canonical adds in their own mutations/additions to Sid and then releases Ubuntu LTS that April, Ubntu LTS 26.04 has been out since April of this year.

Mint then takes Ubuntu LTS strips out some of the Ubuntu BS like snaps then bolts on their own desktops and releases Mint that summer, usually June or July. we should have Mint 23 by now, but this cycle there is a delay until December of this year. Mint 22 is in overtime, based on Sid of 2.5 years ago, the packages are certainly older now.

Mint is getting this old because Clem and Co have chosen to delay Mint23 until December to give themselves room to get important large jobs done, potentially including stable Wayland in Cinnamon. But in the mean time, already old repo software keeps getting older.

In odd years there is a freeze in Debian Testing (separate from Sid) and a new Debian stable is born. Debian 13 Trixie released last August, Mint takes Debian stable bolts on the Mint Cinnamon desktop with few other changes and releases LMDE anywhere from March to October of odd years. this happened in October of 2025 with LMDE7, so LMDE7 is currently 15 months ahead of Mint 22, and this disparity includes available repository software.

LMDE7 will net you things like apt 3, Fastfetch, newer mesa etc over Mint 22.3. Mint23 will release in December relieving Mint22 and get its time in the sun as the newest “Mint”. But, LMDE8 will be releasing an unusually short 3 to 10 months afterwards and it will be the newest Mint again until June/July 2028 when Mint24 releases and the cycle repeasts

So for the next 2 years LMDE will spend most of that time, 13 to 20 months as the “newest Mint”.

There are negatives. LMDE does not have Mint's GUI driver manager, crucial for some CLI-phobic new users, especially those with Nvidia GPUs. Also no PPAs. These tools are based on Ubuntu only infrastructure. You could consider LMDE to be "Mint Light" its a bit lighter on RAM and a bit faster than standard Mint, but only just slightly so.

The LMDE base system is cleaner with noticeably fewer system files, and attendant updates they bring, just as Debian is lighter than Ubuntu. It is not something you would notice immediately, they look nearly identical, and behave quite similarly, just small differences in the details.

LMDE also has a better in-house Mint made installer, particularly with regards to functional control on the placement of grub. As opposed to the Ubuntu made Ubiquity installer used in regular Mint, but only for now, Mint is dropping Ubiquity, the next version of Mint will use the LMDE installer.

LMDE has noticeably less update noise,

Ubuntu does add some extended driver support, particularly for consumer grade hardware. conversely Debian stable is currently ahead in development from Ubuntu LTS, from a hardware support perspective there can be specific corner cases that could be better served on either edition. I had a Dell 5810 that did not like Debian 12's grub (Bookworm), I had to boot both Debian & LMDE using Mint's (Ubuntu's) grub on just that one machine.

Everyone should pick what is best for them, but I think for now more people should be considering LMDE.

I rebuilt my desktop last year and this board has been good to me except for this one annoyance.

Every few months it will "forget" some or all of it's boot entries. Links in the nvram to my various bootloaders.

I then have to get back into Linux by booting a USB with rEFInd and reestablish boot entries to a bootloader with efibootmgr in the cli.

I have also noticed if the system boots without one of the drives present that has an efi partition it will forget that bootloader even of you reintroduce the drive layer, but sometimes these entries will mysteriously return weeks later.

I have had other boards where you could add a boot entry right from the bios but this bios seems to lack that feature.

Is anyone else experiencing this and more importantly what can be done about it?

Solved

I want to make it through those 3 changes while retaining my phone number I have had since 1999. There is a lot riding on that phone number.

Desired end result here is GraphineOS on a Pixel 10 Pro XL with Mint Mobile.

I am currently on a Samsung S23 Ultra with AT&T

My instincts say to move AT&T to the new phone then port that new number to Mint mobile then last step install GraphineOS

But I cam curious to hear from others that have made similar moves?

How should I go about this?

Edit, I went ahead with the copy and the system boots and runs, I do not know why it changed but it is aparently OK.

I am in process of rebuilding a pool per instructions semi-derived from.

https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/v3.1.x/guides/debian/uefi.html

I am following notes I have used before.

create command

sudo zpool create -f -o ashift=12 \
 -O compression=lz4 \
 -O acltype=posixacl \
 -O xattr=sa \
 -O relatime=on \
 -o autotrim=on \
 -m none suwannee /dev/disk/by-id/nvme-eui.0025384931406ac8

in the past the step looked like this

mount | grep mnt
suwannee/ROOT/Void on /mnt type zfs (rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl)

but today

sudo zpool export suwannee
sudo mkdir /mnt/suwannee
sudo zpool import -f -N -R /mnt/suwannee suwannee
sudo zfs create -o mountpoint=/ -o canmount=noauto suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7
sudo mkdir /mnt/870/donor
sudo mount /dev/sdd3 /mnt/870/donor
sudo zfs mount suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7
mount | grep mnt
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7 on /mnt/suwannee type zfs (rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl,casesensitive)

My pools being for Linux have always been case sensitive as the pool property, but it has never been displayed as mount property.

example

zfs get all | grep casesensitivity
NAME                                                                             PROPERTY                VALUE                        SOURCE

lagoon/suwannee/ROOT/Void_Xfce@autosnap_2026-03-03_05:00:03_monthly              casesensitivity         sensitive                    -

I will continue on, but will this be an issue? Why did it change? did I make a mistake somewhere? or has ZFS changed? this is the first time I have created a pool under Debians ZFS v2.4.3-1~bpo13+1

I had a very efficient update script. that had bee working nicely for a while

it hinged on the appimage being named LibreWolf.x86_64.AppImage as it always was, but is now librewolf-152.0.1-2-linux-x86_64-appimage.appimage

and "latest working working which has stopped at 151.

https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/24386000/packages/generic/librewolf/latest/

#!/bin/bash
#Delete old backup
rm /home/dad/Downloads/Software/LibreWolf/LibreWolf.x86_64.AppImage.old
#Move current AppImage to backup
mv /home/dad/Downloads/Software/LibreWolf/LibreWolf.x86_64.AppImage /home/dad/Downloads/Software/LibreWolf/LibreWolf.x86_64.AppImage.old
#Download new
wget -P /home/dad/Downloads/Software/LibreWolf/  https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/24386000/packages/generic/librewolf/latest/LibreWolf.x86_64.AppImage
#Copy new to running position 
cp /home/dad/Downloads/Software/LibreWolf/LibreWolf.x86_64.AppImage /mnt/870/LibreWolf/LibreWolf/LibreWolf.x86_64.AppImage
#make executable
chmod +x /mnt/870/LibreWolf/LibreWolf/LibreWolf.x86_64.AppImage

renaming I can figure out a work around

but any idea how to find "latest" from a script?

MATE is shockingly old looking desktop at first glance.

I made a secondary install of Mint MATE just for comparisons with other systems (ram use etc) and once I got past the looks, I actually kinda dig it. Its almost as light Xfce but a bit more comfortable and intuitive. It has some well thought out features.

Should I just keep tinkering with Mint MATE or should I look into perhaps a Debian MATE install for a little fresher software? For some reason I feel like that may be a good pairing but I have never tried it.

What is the cannon MATE distribution? Which distribution has their finger on the MATE pulse and ships a nice well rounded version of it? Like Mint is for Cinnamon? or I kinda feel Void is for Xfce, some would probably say MXLinux here. Is there even such a thing for MATE?

I have run Void for a few years but unil last year just on the side, this install is the first time I have spent much time with it actually paying attention.

[dad@RatRod ~]$ sudo xbps-install -Svu
[*] Updating repository............

Name              Action    Version           New version            Download size
linux6.12         update    6.12.87_1         6.12.88_1              157MB
linux6.18         update    6.18.29_1         6.18.31_1              160MB
....

ref https://docs.voidlinux.org/config/kernel.html

I have retained the default linux kernel series, as opposed to the bledding edge linux-mainline or older linux-lts, I use ZFS on root and that so far has been a reliable choice. The bog standard "linux" package was 6.12.xx when I installed Void early 2025, and remained so until a few weeks ago when 6.18.x popped in on its own. Ok "rolling stable", got it.

To not have to compile ZFS updates to a large number of kernels I do run vkpurge rm all after updates, this leaves me the current kernel, and one backup just in case. very reasonable.

what I expected to happen was for 6.12 to eventually fall off and get vkpurge'd and I would retain two version of 6.18. but that is not what I am getting. instead 6.12 is remaining the backup and 6.18 the primary.

will this eventually settle out on its own after a transition period or to I need to manually delete 6.12?

I am currently on 300Mb WISP, its usable but limiting for a family of 6. At that load this old box does not even break a sweat. Its age has been a non issue. this box was a free "hand me down" perfect for OPNsense, 'til now?

~2011 HP SFF 8200E8S, i5-2400 Processor, 4 core 3.4GHZ, single 16x PCIe2 slot for the Nic, 8GB of ram.

I have ordered a 10Gb SFP+ NIC, Intel based Supermicro AOC-STGN-12S, https://www.ebay.com/itm/325118572973 for WAN side SFP+, a hopefully not too cheap BaseT module https://www.ebay.com/itm/336574118889, for connection to my Arista 7050SX switch a SFP+ DACC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075XLYHXR.

The rest of my modest homelab and office is already running 40 Gbit where it maters.

Frontier/FIOS rolled out 5Gb fiber in my area, I ordered 5Gbit for less monthly than I am paying now for 300Mb Wisp. I think the weak link here is going to be the OPNsense PC? but I want to see before I replace hardware that may work.

Edit:

I do not currently do anything interesting no IPS, just firewall, some DNS filtering through Unbound lists, lan address management, network time etc. generally easy workload.

Currently this old box is basically idling.

https://postimg.cc/fJPDxqLw

more higher peak bandwidth will of course change that.

Edit 2, after discussions here I ordered a used 3770 CPU, $30. Still not certain if it will be sufficent but it maxes out the platform so we will see. I will test with the i5-2400 first just to get the data point.