My dad uses Ubuntu as an htpc and has livepatch enabled, but every year or so when I visit it’s always out of date. This time it needed a partial patch.
Is Ubuntu just bad, is there a better alternative that’s closer to Windows where the machine are actually kept up to date?
Ubuntu would not be my first choice.
If he can get most of his programs via Flatpak or AppImage, and he doesn’t intend to do a lot of tinkering via command line, check out Aurora. The Fedora Atomic distros and the UBlue derivatives are great “set it and forget it” options, and I believe Aurora has automatic updates set up out of the box.
The best part is that if something gets fucked up by an update, you can just rollback to a previous state in GRUB.
Using
distrobox, he could even set up an Ubuntu container to install anything that’s only available in the Ubuntu repos (and I recommend the companion app Box Buddy).The one downside is that any tinkering will require learning a new paradigm, since most of the system is immutable, except for
/etcand/var, which is where the user’s/homedirectory is (i.e./var/home).If all of that sounds too daunting, or you want a more traditional distro experience, install Mint and call it a day. Good luck!
Mint handles updates better you figure?
The immutable might be a good option but I think I might give it a few more years of development.
I couldn’t say on the updates for Mint, as I use CachyOS, but I know that lots of people love and recommend it, in part because the opinionated changes it makes almost always have the end user in mind.
I do have experience with Bazzite (a sibling to Aurora), and worrying about updates is virtually zero. That’s because of how the updates actually happen. You’re not modifying the system directly, you’re creating a new image based on an upstream version that was built and tested each time.
The idea is that you have a “master copy” that can be deployed at scale and has some level of guarantee to work. If it doesn’t, you rollback. No downtime, since you should theoretically always have an image that works, even if it’s not up to date.
Whatever you choose, something with KDE Plasma or Cinnamon as the DE would feel the most like Windows.
What do you mean by “out of date”… what is out of date? According to what?
Livepatch is only for kernel security fixes… it doesn’t upgrade the regular packages on your system if that’s what you mean by “out of date”. You either need to run apt (or a GUI version) manually or set it to automatically update your system packages.
Livepatch is implemented in a hacking way. It dynamically patch kernel code in memory so it should only be used in the machine can’t be reboot completely. For a normal machine, use unattended-upgrades instead.
