Which distro for long term support?

[donlinux]

OK, I'm almost ready to make the jump to put a linux distro on my main box for business ( I work out of my home office) and relegate windoze to my secondary box which is now my linux experimental box. I consider myself as 1/4 step past the newbie stage and have explored, burned, loaded what seems like a ton of distros in the past three years. Since discovering Mint, I'm hooked but I guess my question is one of upgrades. I keep a secondary box for all of my play distros, and I will have my primary os on my main box. I'm considering Cassandra as stable now and would like to use it as my primary business os, but I fear having to "fresh install" Celena or whatever distro follows when Cassandra is no longer supported. Depending upon how you look at it, this is usually not a problem with windoze as releases are pushed out in years versus months. What I don't want to have to do is keep doing a fresh install and I guess the burning question is whether the new releases after Cassandra will be easily upgradeable or if a fresh install will be required and if upgradeable, what would I be missing, similar to missing the eye candy from Bianca to Cassandra.

Many thanks in advance for any and all input.

[Boo]

The upgrade path of mint is a question that keeps popping up and the support of mint releases is another.

The funny thing is that any good upgrade path starts with your initial install and how you partition your disk. So actually thinking of the upgrade path before you even install is the first step. Scorp123 has done a very good partitioning howto in the tips and tricks section. Most of your upgrade problems are removed with just creating a separate /home partition.

There are two types of upgrades for mint:
Major upgrade, this would be an upgrade between major version numbers. eg Mint 3.x to Mint 4.x. KISS, backup, and just reinstall. Make sure you have a list of the extra packages you added so you can add them again once installed.

Minor upgrade, this would be an upgrade between minor or point version numbers. eg Mint 3.0 to Mint 3.1. These types of upgrades generally only have some new mint applications and artwork. so you can update your /etc/sources.list with the new mint name repository, update, upgrade and install the new mint applications. I would not worry about the artwork as it is not critical even if it is awesome.

The release notes for each edition will give more detail on upgrades.

[frank392]

Hi donlinx,
I think you have the same problem as I do.

I'm considering Cassandra as stable now and would like to use it as my primary business os, but I fear having to "fresh install" Celena

why you want to use Celena if you have a stable system at the moment?
do you need the latest and the greatest software for work?
I'm asking you these because I use Bianca for work with out any modification on the repositories as boo suggested, and I purge all the updates that I do no consider important on that machine so It would no get broke, remember do not fix what is not broken.
hopefully some day Mint will use some other distro as base (Ihope it would be Debian) or create there own repositories.

[donlinux]

I think it pretty much comes down to the fact that I like "new" and I want to keep trying it. I keep two separate hd's now so that one will have my stable linux distro and the other has my testing distros.

Going with the separate home partition appears to be my best bet and probably what I will try when I get the time to officially move everything over.

Thanks for the input.