Record donations, busy developers, and a proposal to slow down Linux Mint’s release cadence. We want to know if you’re on board.
You’ve probably heard the news already that Linux Mint might be cutting back on the frequency of new releases. In a post published on Wednesday, Mint’s lead developer and overall head honcho, Clem Lefebvre, said that he and his team are thinking about throttling the distro’s release schedule.
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On Thursday, several open source websites picked up the story and ran with it, including Gaming on Linux, Ostechnix, It’s FOSS, How-To Geek, and OMG! Ubuntu (after that I quit paying attention, although I could see articles from other lined up in the search queue).
The reason for the proposed change isn’t a lack of money. The distribution is on something of a roll when it comes to fundraising, with over 1,000 folks contributing money to the project in December, in addition to the dozen or so commercial sponsors that contribute on a regular basis.
“This number of donors in a single month is unprecedented,” Lefebvre said. “I like to imagine that many people gathered together at the same time just to support our project. It’s humbling and incredibly motivating. I feel really proud of this community and delighted to see how happy you are with our work.”
So, if the slowdown isn’t due to money issues, what then? Basically it boils down to good stewardship. He said that cutting back on the number of official releases would give developers more time to develop new features, rather than spend a lot of effort doing the grunt work required to push new releases out the door.
“Whether we ‘distribute’ (for instance with KDE) or we actively develop solutions (for instance with XApp and Cinnamon), we spend a lot of time in release management,” he said. “Releasing often is important because it means we get a lot of feedback and bug reports when we introduce changes. We follow the same process over and over again. It’s a process that works very well and it produces these incremental improvements release after release.
“But it takes a lot of time, and it caps our ambition when it comes to development,” he added. “With a release every six months plus LMDE, we spend more time testing, fixing, and releasing than developing.”
So far, most of the press seems to be onboard with the slowdown of the release cycle in order to give developers more time to do what they do best, which is develop. As a dyed-in-the-wool Linux user — a perfectly appropriate expression to use for a distro that hails from Ireland — I also agree, especially given the excellent quality of the tools that Lefebvre and his team have developed for Mint.
Lefebvre’s assertion that Mint currently releases twice a year “plus LMDE,” in some ways fails to address the complexity of Mint’s release cycle. It’s true that, by version number, Linux Mint releases twice yearly, with a major point release every two years, and with three minor point releases in between. Each one of these releases includes three distinct editions — Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce — which is no minor feat, given the amount of integration and polish Mint devs apply to each.
Add to that the extra work the team puts into releasing Linux Mint Debian Edition, based on a whole ‘nother upstream source, and it’s easy to see that release efforts alone are a big time suck for the team.
What I’m suspecting Lefebvre and Company to do is drop two of the minor point releases, which would bring Mint’s schedule down to a single release per year, with a major point release on even numbered years (just like now), and a minor point release on odd numbered years. Nothing other than that makes sense.
This would have little to no effect on most users, since I suspect that a lot of users, similar to me, have settled in on a major point release, which they use until the end of its five-year support cycle approaches before upgrading to the most recent major point version. Even users who generally upgrade with every minor point release should be happy, as it means facing the work and uncertainty of an upgrade less often.
“We made some bold moves in the past, sticking to LTS, rejecting Snap, developing alternatives to a new GNOME that didn’t feel like GNOME, and I’m really glad we did,” Lefebvre said. “These decisions weren’t easy to make and some of them cost a huge amount of time and resources to implement. But looking back, I think they were key. I think we’re first and foremost an operating system: a product, a user experience. We’re also a ‘distribution,’ but we’re not just a distribution.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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