Distrochooser
Distrochooser
The Distrochooser helps you to find the suitable Linux distribution based on your needs!
There are countless Distros that do not always make it easy to choose the one that best suits each person's needs and knowledge. This page, through a small test, proposes the Distro or Distros that best fit.
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It misses one important choice: "I want to get notified of new releases of the operating system and want to have a graphical upgrade path."
Otherwise people just run their no longer supported OS until something stops working (I've seen this countless times ...), as very few people follow blog posts or social media feeds of their operating system.
This rules out lots of supposedly "beginner friendly" distributions, such as elementary OS or Linux Mint, as they don't notify users about the availability of a new distribution release. Elementary OS doesn't even offer in-place upgrades and requires a reinstallation.
Is that just something that's intrinsically missing from some distros due to technical constraints or is it a regular type of feature the simply hasn't been implemented (yet) due to... human constraints?
Linux Mint nowadays supports release upgrades, but you have to follow their blog to know when a new major Mint release is out and you have to manually install
mintupgradeand do the upgrade.So it is definitely not caused by technical constraints, as Mint has implemented the difficult part (providing and testing an upgrade path) already. Notifying the user about a new release upgrade shouldn't be too difficult? E. g. in the most simple form you could probably preinstall a package that does nothing at first, but receives an update once the next Mint release is out to send a notification to the user to inform about a new Mint release.
When it comes to elementary OS, I think they could support in-place upgrades, as they properly use metapackages (unlike Mint, which marks most packages as manually installed and doesn't really utilise automatically installed packages and metapackages in a way that you would expect on a Ubuntu-based distro), but they probably don't want to allocate / don't have the resources to test an official upgrade path.
But again, I don't understand why it is so difficult for elementary OS to at least provide a simple notification to the user that a new version is out. Even if the users have to reinstall, it is critical to inform them that their OS is about to become end of life. You know, people do things like online banking on their computers ...
It's the first thing I check with every distribution and if it doesn't have an EOL / upgrade notification, it is immediately out.
someone could develop a program that notifies you when new updates are available for linux mint
mint update notifier