Yes I think you mentioned the relevant points here. Ubuntu tests their preinstalled software, while there is tons more in the repos that is not as tested. Same with Mint.
And they backport only stuff they think is necessary. For example Plasma 5 is based on the EOL Qt5 and backporting things to Plasma 5 is nearly impossible as you need real Plasma devs and nobody really wants to do that.
Plasma 6 is really stable, 6.1 not so much, but the timing was not perfect. Simply because they do their release schedule as fixed as that.
It is a total pain if you simply want working software, as they may backport some stuff, but all the stuff not preinstalled, or that is very complex, will not get fixes.
This is the same with all stable distros, if the maintainers dont literally maintain all the software there is.
I mean, that’s definitely a downside to long term stable distros. So, basically, the choice is between that and a rolling release which has the downside of the possibility of things breaking on update and never really having an easily reproducible build
Yes I think you mentioned the relevant points here. Ubuntu tests their preinstalled software, while there is tons more in the repos that is not as tested. Same with Mint.
And they backport only stuff they think is necessary. For example Plasma 5 is based on the EOL Qt5 and backporting things to Plasma 5 is nearly impossible as you need real Plasma devs and nobody really wants to do that.
Plasma 6 is really stable, 6.1 not so much, but the timing was not perfect. Simply because they do their release schedule as fixed as that.
It is a total pain if you simply want working software, as they may backport some stuff, but all the stuff not preinstalled, or that is very complex, will not get fixes.
This is the same with all stable distros, if the maintainers dont literally maintain all the software there is.
I mean, that’s definitely a downside to long term stable distros. So, basically, the choice is between that and a rolling release which has the downside of the possibility of things breaking on update and never really having an easily reproducible build
No, Fedora is semi-rolling with less random freezes. Regular Ubuntu is similar but just not Ubuntu please.
Fedora also had 13 months of support so staying on the older version gives an extra stability.
And then there is OpenSUSE slowroll, which is CI/CD with more testing
Fedora is not rolling at all, it just has a fast release cycle
It is semi-rolling. They ship different point releases and kernels within a release