The developers of the Linux Mint distribution intend to rework the update installation manager in the next release to force the distribution to be kept up to date. The study showed that only about 30% of users install updates in a timely manner, less than a week after they were published.
Telemetry is not collected in Linux Mint, so an indirect method was used to assess the relevance of distribution components based on an analysis of the versions of Firefox used. The developers of Linux Mint, together with Yahoo, analyzed which version of the browser is used by Linux Mint users. After the release of the Firefox 85.0 update package, based on the value of the User Agent header transmitted when accessing Yahoo services, the dynamics of switching Linux Mint users to the new version of Firefox was calculated. The result turned out to be disappointing and in a week only 30% of users switched to the new version, while the rest continued to go online from outdated releases.
Moreover, it turned out that some users do not install updates at all and continue to use Firefox 77 offered in the release of Linux Mint 20. It was also found that 5% of users (30% according to other statistics) continue to use the Linux Mint 17.x branch, which support discontinued in April 2019, i.e. updates on these systems have not been installed for two years. The 5% figure is based on an estimate of requests from the browser start page, and 30% is based on calls to the repositories by the APT package manager.
From the comments of users who do not update their systems, it can be understood that the main reasons for using old versions are ignorance about the availability of updates, installation on outdated hardware that does not have enough resources to run new versions of the distribution, unwillingness to change the familiar environment, the appearance of regressive changes in new branches , such as issues with video drivers, and the end of support for 32-bit systems.
The developers of Linux Mint looked at two main ways to push updates more aggressively: increasing user awareness of updates, and automatically installing updates by default, with the ability to easily fall back to manual mode for those who are used to managing their system on their own.
In the next release of Linux Mint, it was decided to add additional metrics to the update manager to assess the relevance of packages in the system, such as the number of days since the last application of updates. If there are no updates for a long time, Update Manager will start displaying reminders about the need to apply the accumulated updates or switch to a new branch of the distribution. In this case, warnings can be disabled in the settings. Linux Mint continues to adhere to the principle that hard imposition is unacceptable, as the user owns the computer and is free to do whatever they want with it. Switching to automatic installation of updates is not yet planned.
Source: opennet.ru