this is getting tougher as the posts go by
they are 2 completely distros and the upgrade approach
has to be totally different as well:
- in lmde (or debian testing or sid) you should always use dist-upgrade: the system changes too much under the hood and you need a tool that provides you the cleaning material to keep it tidy; i don't see option here: you are better off holding updates for some time if you see something fishy in there (and that happens a lot believe me
) than resort to upgrades and mess up the dependencies chain (i vaguely remember issues with libavformat-something that should be removed for the new version be installed and users that were holding this replacement at the time had troubles after)
- in the main edition, it's basically a user's choice together with hardware limitations: explaining >>
- do you need the new kernel? are you having hardware issues, drivers issues? do you think that your setup will be better supported with the newest lib? it can happen: there's an issue with the new intel cards and the current kernel http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 05#p611705
- do you value more stability?
- do you have a lot of ppa's enabled? and what kind of ppa's? the stable ones or the bleeding edge ones? the ones that update daily and sometimes require new core components to function properly
- the kernel upgrades are not the worst part that can happen specially because the old one remains in grub and if you have any issue with the new one simply use the old one, the main instability can come from mesa/xorg
as you see there's not one answer:
1- if you are in the short-term releases and don't have any fancy ppa's >> upgrade should be fine;
2- short-term releases but with bleeding edge ppa's >> maybe watch the dist-upgrade output once in awhile;
3- LTS without cutting edge ppa's >> for now i believe that upgrade should be fine but 5 years is a lifetime in linux (not that i believe that anyone will be using maya in 2017)
4- LTS with ppa's >> i would follow point 2.
feel free to hit me again