LMDE4 life and support

[sagsaw]

How long will LMDE4 be supported?

Will it take advantage of the Debian LTS take advantage of Debian LTS and provide LMDE4 with 5 years of support?

https://www.debian.org/lts/

[xenopeek]

The short answer: to be decided. It's not known yet. It will most likely at minimum be supported for a few months until after an eventual LMDE 5 release to allow users time to do their upgrade, just as was the case for LMDE 3.

I can understand you want 5+ years of support but it may not get that. If it doesn't get extended support you could still continue to use it if you can accept Linux Mint developed software and maintained packages (http://packages.linuxmint.com/) no longer get updates. It then mostly comes down to replacing the web browser to ensure you continue to get security updates for that at least.

LMDE has a small userbase but it is important to Linux Mint. See this blog post from earlier this year that details that: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3953

[antikythera]

To replace the Mint repository copy of Firefox with the Debian repository one can easily be done in synaptic package manager. I use Google Chrome which comes direct from Google's repositories instead.

So yes you can use LMDE4 as long as Buster is still getting updates and remain safe enough because the majority of packages used by LMDE4 come from buster repositories anyway. Like xenopeek mentions the only victims may be linux mint packages but some are being made available now as flatpaks anyway like Warpinator. If they did that for the rest of the Mint applications then happy days

[ddog241]

If you are concerned about breakage during and upgrade from 4 to 5 (when ever 5 comes out) just wait a couple months and see if any issues are reported, if none reported in the couple month wait, then might as well upgrade to 5. (what I will most likely do is upgrade after about 60 days or so with no reports of breakage.)

[sagsaw]

Me or anyone would be fine with upgrading LMDE4 to LMDE5 as long as its seamless without any hiccups ...

Just as I seamlessly updated from 19.3 to 20.0 Linuxmint Mate

5 years of support is of course utmost desirable just like Linuxmint for peace of mind.

But so long as the upgrades are seamless though time consuming then most will fine with it.

[sagsaw]

I can understand you want 5+ years of support but it may not get that. If it doesn't get extended support you could still continue to use it if you can accept Linux Mint developed software and maintained packages (http://packages.linuxmint.com/) no longer get updates. It then mostly comes down to replacing the web browser to ensure you continue to get security updates for that at least.

LMDE has a small userbase but it is important to Linux Mint. See this blog post from earlier this year that details that: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3953

I think Debian LTS supports for 3 more years to complete the 5 year cycle. But not sure if they support all the packages.

[sagsaw]

The short answer: to be decided. It's not known yet. It will most likely at minimum be supported for a few months until after an eventual LMDE 5 release to allow users time to do their upgrade, just as was the case for LMDE 3.

LMDE has a small userbase but it is important to Linux Mint. See this blog post from earlier this year that details that: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3953

With Linuxmint 20.1 releasing in December as per this post https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3969,

Will LMDE also update to LMDE 4.1? Will LMDE4 benefit from all the new updates in Linuxmint 20.1?

[sagsaw]

LMDE 4 is quite stable and very close to Linuxmint feel.

It would really be great to have a LMDE 4 Mate.

[antikythera]

There's a german community ISO. You can install from it and change the language. However, if you are struggling with dialogues keep a tablet or smartphone handy and google translate them.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxm ... /lmde%204/

[DavidTerp]

These explanations are clear. But all documentations and blog from Linux Mint don't mentioned about life support of LMDE, neither wikipedia. Please, add some words of explanation in your documentation about life support.

[urdrwho]

Was it almost two years between LMDE 3 and the release of LMDE 4 ? If so I wonder if it was be two years between the release of LMDE 4 and then LMDE 5?

My dates for the upgrade from three to four could be incorrect.