0

I am newish to Linux. Distro: Linux Mint 22.2

I understand that apt upgrade replaces apps with any newer versions which may be out there. But only apps which are being "package-managed", as I understand it.

The problem is that, it seems, often these versions are quite a long way out of date.

And that the conventional way to upgrade such old versions is to find out about a PPA for a given project. For example, I had to work out how this works for VirtualBox yesterday or the day before.

Is there any systematic strategy for keeping apps from PPAs up-to-date? Or do you just have to keep a manual list of what you've installed using PPAs?

Today I also upgraded an app in another way: apt had installed restic on my system, but only version 0.16. The latest version is 0.18. I was told how to get hold of this by the devs in the restic forum: it involved downloading a tar.gz from the corresponding github "releases" page, extracting the file, making it executable and putting it somewhere appropriate.

As it happens restic now has its own command, self-update, which you can run whenever you feel like it.

But with apps which don't, but which aren't even from a PPA, what's that recommended way of "remembering" to upgrade apps at a reasonable frequency? Just keep a list?

Is there any reason why versions in the apt package management system are seemingly so laggy?

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

Is there any systematic strategy for keeping apps from PPAs up-to-date? Or do you just have to keep a manual list of what you've installed using PPAs?

PPAs are, from apt's perspective, just perfectly normal repositories from which packages (and updates) are fetched. You don't have to do anything special.

But only apps which are being "package-managed", as I understand it.

right! And that includes PPA-installed packages.

Today I also upgraded an app in another way: apt had installed restic on my system, but only version 0.16. The latest version is 0.18. I was told how to get hold of this by the devs in the restic forum: it involved downloading a tar.gz from the corresponding github "releases" page, extracting the file, making it executable and putting it somewhere appropriate.

Well, yeah, but that's not great for automatic updating, as you noticed. A different way would have been to download the Mint (meaning: debian) package sources. Maybe they are already at version 0.18; if not, you could have updated the build recipe form 0.16 to 0.18; build the apt package and installed it via apt. That way, it would have automatically updated when mint included 0.19.

But with apps which don't, but which aren't even from a PPA, what's that recommended way of "remembering" to upgrade apps at a reasonable frequency? Just keep a list?

Yes.

Is there any reason why versions in the apt package management system are seemingly so laggy?

You're using Mint, which is intentionally very conservative (it derives from Ubuntu long-term-support releases, and these themselves are typically behind debian testing); so, this is a matter of choice of Linux distro. For example, debian stable is shipping restic 0.18, Ubuntu 25.04 is shipping restic 0.17, Ubuntu 25.10 ships restic 0.18. Mint also doesn't do very frequent distro releases, so you cannot just "hop on a newer Mint version" very often.

But: if you like Mint, and want the extra speed, maybe try Ubuntu? It does put out an update every 6 months, and technologically, it's pretty close (and all the apt commands you've learned work the same).

If you like bleeding edge software (I'm not sure I would want to use bleeding edge backup software? I'd be pretty happy with someone trying it before me… then again, I'm using a very recent version, too), then maybe go for either debian unstable (which contains "software versions that have been tested thoroughly but could not end up in debian stable yet, because they're a major change"); if you want to try a fast-moving regular-release distro that's not using apt but dnf, I do like fedora. But then you need to learn a new set of package management commands (they're not completely different. You install, uninstall, update, and search for packages).

Improve this answer
3
  • Thanks, that's really helpful. I'm going to have a think about Ubuntu, so the L&F obviously wouldn't be a million miles from Mint. Mint does have this feel (I have no idea of how this is organised) of a self-contained system with not too many sharp edges, and a good supporting community. But the lagginess of all these apps is a bit of a drag, now that I learn that other distros are better. Having to work out the whole PPA thing all the time (maybe it gets easier) is kind of annoying. Hmmm... Commented Nov 10 at 19:20
  • 2
    Do note that more often than not, it's not really crucial that you have the newest version of everything. Just because your neighbour has a car that he bought this fall doesn't mean your car from last year is bad. It's rather rare that a new user needs "bleeding edge" for more than one or two pieces of software – however, it's pretty common that users fall prey to an "update-itis", where newer versions just sound better, even if the features added don't matter to the user at all. Often, bugs are backported, and you don't even notice! this is even the norm for critical security issues. Commented Nov 10 at 23:16
  • Yup, good point. Commented Nov 11 at 8:39

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.