Security Updates Question

[Roby]

Hi,

I apologize if I've missed this in a topic somewhere (or failed to understand it where it was written). I've spent a while reading about UP and security updates. I understand there's a way to have your repos pull potentially less stable packages sooner than the UP packages. How much sooner is this? Does it dramatically impact the security of your system?

Also, does the average home user (who is at a novice level with Debian) need to worry about these updates (from the UP) being far apart?

Thank you

[py-thon]

The way to get more frequent updates is to change your sources.list to track Debian Testing instead von LMDE.
How to do this: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=201&t=123323
Problems that can arise: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=198&t=132747

Does it dramatically impact the security of your system?

Tracking testing will have negative effect on stability of your system as you are prone to encounter one or more buggy packages sooner or later. There seem to be bigger problems with Cinnamon than with Mate.
However the current update policy to only publish 2 UPs per year in my opinion has negative effects on security and recent UPs have killed several systems which is not what I call stability. LMDE sadly seems to change from semi-rolling to stumbling.
So you have to decide what's more important to you, stability (which means to track LMDE, use the current LTS-version 13 or Debian Wheezy) or security (which means to track Debian Testing or leave LMDE for some other distribution, new Mint versions from 16 onwards skip most of Ubuntu's kernel updates so they are no option in my opinion).

[Zill]

...So you have to decide what's more important to you, stability ... or security...

This pretty much sums it up - you can't really have both!

For an "average home user" (i.e. not running internet servers) LMDE with UPs is a good compromise that is both stable enough and secure enough for normal use IMHO. You can only really improve one at the expense of the other!

[killer de bug]

Tracking testing will have negative effect on stability of your system as you are prone to encounter one or more buggy packages sooner or later. There seem to be bigger problems with Cinnamon than with Mate.

With Cinnamon 2.0 being independent from Gnome, this is probably finished. Cinnamon and Mate will be stable before Testing. This is of course my opinion and this should be verified.

[Roby]

Thank you. I loaded the live iso on a usb and went for the install