Mint should just switch to Debian as upstream, they already have LMDE anyway.

TBF, it's not the first time the LTS base changes, and it wasn't a disaster at all.

Despite, there's the Debian and Linux mint repos, as well as the entirety of flatpak.

It will be fine.

Well said. I appreciate you refining the context.

This

Most of Ubuntu is obsolete the day it's released because of how Ubuntu is structured: the supported Main repository and the unsupported Universe repository (unsupported by Canonical and entirely relying on community members that backport bug fixes in accordance to Canonical's strict version freeze rules).

So it's a coin toss if Universe packages get updates at all and if they do in which time frame. Packages in Universe also are not release blocking, so breakages known ahead of release there are waved through, as happened only very recently with 25.10 and it's broken Flatpak support.

So the majority of packages are unsupported and Mint insists to build a newbie targeting distribution out of this and carry ancient packages around for years. The Mint team is already having their hands full with replacing Snap software with their own deb packages, so they don't have the capacity to deal with all Universe packages. Probably they hope that software for their user base gets updated by an unpaid Ubuntu community member and that unfixed packages are simply not used by their users.

I think it's the moral duty of us more knowledgeable people to discourage the use of Mint. If someone wants a Mint distribution, better use LMDE. Otherwise something like a Fedora Spin is probably currently the best newbie friendly option these days.

I'm more referring to the hype that surrounds the launch of updates to popular distros, such as LM and Ubuntu. IMO it seems metrics like DistroWatch fluctuate around these releases.

I know it sounds silly.