Mint Update

[MagnusB]

Updating X is risky on any system. Now, if there is a gaping security hole in X, that might be included as a "safe" update, depending on the situation. But the Ubuntu team doesn't include a brand new version of X within a release, so you won't be missing out on much, just some patches here and there.

[MagnusB]

Since Mint isn't a rolling release, you shouldn't keep install for 10 years. Kernel and X won't be updated to a newer version in those years, anyway, the updates would be just some patches etc.. If you want that, you are better off using a rolling release like Arch Linux (and even there, the kernel is locked by default, IIRC).

This is a conscious decision by the Mint team, as they want stability over security. If the security hole is sever enough, it will most likely be included as a "safe" update, at least one kernel update has been included in Daryna. You can enable them yourself, but you are risking the stability of your system, and you can end up with broken drivers etc etc. If you know what you are doing, include those packages at own risk, but this is not recommended.

And if it is added functionality, most updates don't add that, most of them are minor fixes, some are security fixes and a few of them add new functionality.

[MagnusB]

Yeah, a dist-upgrade can even update the kernel, usually by a minor number (in example, I have -19 instead of the default -16, can't remember the full version number now). Also, a dist-upgrade is the only way to include new packages in mintUpdate.

Be advised, if you use proprietary graphics driver, make a backup of xorg.conf, and set vesa in the backup, if the graphic driver isn't compatible with the new kernel, you can just set the backup, and then reinstall the proprietary driver (I would recommend doing this if you use an open source driver as well). And if you haven't set a root password in mintAssistant, I recommend doing so, otherwise the recovery mode isn't very useful (as you'll need to log in as root, and mintAssistant set a random root password if you don't activate the root account). And if you have added more repositories than the default ones, you should comment those out in sources.list.

Doing so might sound a bit paranoid, but better safe than sorry. And Arch is an excellent distro, highly configurable and usually very stable. But Arch is a rolling release, Mint is not. What the Ubuntu team basically does, is to take a snapshot of the debian testing repositories, then make that stable. After they have deemed them stable, no version updates is added, just minor patches etc.