Security News > 2021 > February > Linux Mint users in hot water for being slow with security updates, running old versions

Linux Mint founder Clem Lefebvre has complained that too many users are slow to apply updates or run unsupported versions of the operating system.

Linux Mint does not collect telemetry data from users, but used Yahoo! users as a sample to inspect the user agent of Linux Mint traffic - information sent from the browser with every request.

Lefebvre also noted that some users of Mint do not apply updates at all, and that "Between 5 per cent and 30 per cent of users run Linux Mint 17 [which] reached end of life in April 2019. In other words, it stopped receiving security patches for almost two years now!".

Google's Chrome OS automatically downloads updates and prompts the users to restart to update.

In the case of Linux Mint, Lefebvre feels that features such as TimeShift, which snapshots the system so that rollback is possible in the case of a bad update, should give users reassurance that they are safe.

"It's naive in itself to assume that all the users yet to upgrade to Linux Mint 20.x are doing so because they are novice or uninformed. There are a plethora of reasons, compatibility and stability being big ones. I haven't done it because of serious issues with video drivers going on between releases 19.x and 20.x versions of Linux Mint," said a user - though this at least is 19.x and not 17.x. Another user said they had an older machine and needed 32-bit Mint, which is not available in version 20.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/02/23/linux_mint_team_berates_users/