Hello everyone,
I switched to Linux Mint on my home PC a few years ago and I’m never going back to Windows. I just wanted something that was free and easy and worked, and so far it’s doing the job.
Update Manager just informed me of a Kernel update. That makes three Kernel updates this week. This seems odd to me.
I thought a Kernel update was a rare occurrence. Is this happening to everyone, or just me? Should I be concerned??
You can get minor version increases. They’re more frequent on Arch. If you think you have a man in the middle trying asking on their forums.
If you want a slower update cadence, consider Debian maybe?
Updates happens usually as needed. If you want something more stable nothing beats Debian and RedHat. The flip side is if you have even remotely recent hardware, it might not work as well or at all.
Not sure what’s changed, if anything, but I have similar feelings that frequency has picked up and I figured it has to be security related. Because there’s simply no need to push out minor feature or bug patches so fast, that’s what distros like Arch are for.
Have people gotten hyper sensitive to risk and become paranoid? Are there more legitimate security issues due to more scrutiny or haxors doing bad things? Tech news exaggerating security issues for clickbait more than usual? Less informed people going into the field overreacting to exploits that are more academic than practically exploitable? All of that?
I figured they’re just trying to do a good job staying ahead of security fixes, along with much of the industry getting a little more vigilant lately due to the number of high profile security issues (legit or not). They did get burned with a hack some years ago, that tends to be a wake up call.
You’d have to look at the specific updates.
There’s 2 reasons a package can update, one is a new upstream (i.e. in this case the Kernel) release, the other being a new package release.
The former update is obvious, the latter can happen when an update introduced a packaging bug that’s unrelated to an upstream release, like a faulty build flag, a missing dependency, a missing file, you name it.
Which one is the case you’d have to check with the mint maintainers. I don’t know where Mint’s package sources are located so I can’t say what the case is here. Does the software center not show a changelog?