> Last time I checked, Ubuntu kept existing setup, desktop etc. when upgrading.
Have you ever dist-upgraded an Ubuntu distro? Upgrading to Lucid moved your window controls. Upgrading to Natty turned on Unity. While it's true that upgrading from, say, XP to Win7 will change your start menu, the point is that you can still upgrade your "packages" on XP, WITHOUT having to get the new Win7 start menu.
> I'm speechless, obviously you're babbling without even knowing what you're talking about; ignorance and hate won't lead you anywhere.
Obviously YOU don't know what you're talking about; Debian Mint (LMDE) is based on Debian-testing, which is supposedly HIGHLY unstable.
> the point is that you can still upgrade your "packages" on XP
Like DirectX 10 or 11? The fact that you can upgrade is due to the abnormal shelf life of this particular release of windows. Try upgrading most programs on a win98SE or win2K machine.
> Obviously YOU don't know what you're talking about; Debian Mint (LMDE) is based on Debian-testing, which is supposedly HIGHLY unstable.
Mint is based upon Ubuntu, which is based upon debian-unstable (Sid). Debian testing hardly is highly unstable; most debian users run testing on their desktop systems, and keep stable to the servers.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm referring to. I'm specifically referring to rolling-release distros, of which LMDE is one. It's based on Debian-testing.
Regular Mint is indeed a milestone-based distro built on Ubuntu. But LMDE is a rolling-release based on Debian-testing, with no relation to Ubuntu. That's specifically what I'm referring to.
There are certainly other stable rolling-releases out there, but I think everyone can agree that a distro like Arch is about a lightyear away from being Grandma-friendly (which Ubuntu more or less aims to be).
> It's based on Debian-testing, which is more unstable than Debian-unstable
Wrong. Testing is more stable than Unstable, which is more stable than Experimental. Furthermore, Ubuntu does extremely heavy modification to the Debian base, repackaging quite a number of it's core packages, and replacing a number of central parts at times (eg, the boot system).
If you're going to say that people don't know what they're talking about, please make sure you do.
That's precisely my point. In the Linux world, your distro version is inextricably linked to the versions of every major and minor software package in a way that just doesn't happen in Windows.
If I stuck with Lucid, I'd still be using Firefox 3.6. (Yes you could add a PPA, but opening the terminal is beyond the technical skill of the average user.) Linux won't succeed on the desktop until the phrases "Upgrade Firefox" and "Potentially bork my entire system with unexpected regressions" don't go hand-in-hand.
FF will still auto-upgrade to 6 even on an XP machine.
Ubuntu has a security policy to upgrade supported versions to the latest supported browser version. So, in Lucid, if 3.6 is still supported by Mozilla, that is the version still on maintained (you know, for consistency...thing thing most people here are railing against).
However, as soon as mozilla drops support for 3.6, the latest supported version is installed. This happened for Lucid, as I understand it.
This is a sane policy, IMO.
If, however, you are on Lucid and want to run a different version of Firefox, it is rather trivial. You can find it in Ubuntu Software Center after adding a repo and install it. This is NOT what most non-technical people want to do, however, and that is why the policy makes sense IMO.
And, I agree, FF auto-upgrading itself to 6 is nice on OSX and XP, but that is a Mozilla thing, not Linux. Mozilla makes that difficult to do and the various linux distros need to deal with it.
> your distro version is inextricably linked to the versions of every major and minor software package in a way that just doesn't happen in Windows.
What's the big deal with versions? It's not like it's too much trouble updating Ubuntu from one version to the next (you know you can turn off Unity). Most of the time, you can even continue working while it upgrades. This is not like Windows where you have to reboot the machine with the install media and wait a couple hours to get the new version.
And while the Firefox teams does an amazing job making FF 6 for XP, the same can't be said about the Internet Explorer team. If you want the latest IE, you need to upgrade Windows.
Have you ever dist-upgraded an Ubuntu distro? Upgrading to Lucid moved your window controls. Upgrading to Natty turned on Unity. While it's true that upgrading from, say, XP to Win7 will change your start menu, the point is that you can still upgrade your "packages" on XP, WITHOUT having to get the new Win7 start menu.
> I'm speechless, obviously you're babbling without even knowing what you're talking about; ignorance and hate won't lead you anywhere.
Obviously YOU don't know what you're talking about; Debian Mint (LMDE) is based on Debian-testing, which is supposedly HIGHLY unstable.