A major gripe I have with Cinnamon (and MATE and GNOME in general), is the lack of classic style "cascading" (is that the right word?) menus. Ones which, instead of having a fixed height and scrollbars if items don't fit, display all items at once. KDE 5 has the option.

I second this.

Or a Debian stable with KDE if for some reason you would like to avoid Ubuntu.

--- With Ubuntu or Debian (and almost all non-Mint distributions) you will no longer have to do this to upgrade to the next version, they use sane upgrade paths ;)

Of course, if it is your pleasure to install from scratch, you can still do it. But we will look at you in a judgemental way.

Where did this urban legend spring from?

The upgrade path of Mint (from LTS to LTS) is very similar to Ubuntu's. It usually includes some extra steps to cover whatever Mint changes in its own apps as well.

The warnings they provide are targeted at very new Linux users, which might be scared by running the occasional dpkg-reconfigure or some debugging in the rare case there are issues with the upgrade.

13 months is plenty of time. Certainly better than the hell of having to pull support tickets up because someone is using the 4.x version of something when you've been building the 5.x series. Which JWZ has to deal with, as do many other devs.

I even recently read an article on a project dev getting burnt out because he kept encountering bug reports for obsolete versions.

I don’t know. From what I read recently it’s Mint devs themselves who advise this "upgrade" method.
The most recent example I’ve seen is there.

I have no direct experience with Mint, nor its upgrade process, but the post I linked too is coherent with what I usually read on this topic.

Again, this is true - and they do recommend a clean reinstall as a preferred way of upgrading. To regular non-power users that generally do not have the knowledge to deal with apt. But you can very well upgrade without a reinstall, see here.

Yeah, it's kinda insane how their upgrade process is so gonzo bad.

But it doesn't have KDE! Or even XFCE!

It's kind of a bummer it does not have Candy Crush Saga anymore.
But it does have plenty of other magnificent apps, some of them not even remotely redundant!
And the UI is bang on.
Plus, it always phones back home. That certainly is care, right?

Ah, Microsoft...

Well, as I mentioned in the other thread, I've had failed Ubuntu and Oracle Linux release upgrades as well. (Oracle Linux is based on RHEL, Oracle's sleazy way to leech on RedHat's work or something).

So while the risk might be relatively low, it really sucks when it hits. And maybe I also generally dislike the idea of release upgrades (be it on Windows or Linux) because sometimes they seem to leave behind tons of crap as "backups" or some other stuff they couldn't or didn't want to clean, i dunno... It just feels that if you make a "clean upgrade", you are more in control and know what is happening.

Then again, I've been thinking a rolling upgrade release would be nice too, IF they really are so trouble-free as some people make them to be, ie. hardly ever breaking anything etc. Maybe I need to check what rolling release Linuxes there are anyway, besides Manjaro.

And yeah I still have nightmares of using Fedora a long time ago, it was always buggy as hell when a new release came out. I really felt like I was being their beta tester, a bit like playing only in-dev GOG games or something.

And I guess I wouldn't benefit from it on the bleeding edge anyway as I tend to run Linux mostly on older PCs...

Nixos of course. But if you want LTS to last several years (it will last), the hydra would have no precompiled binaries anymore, so your system would need to compile stuff. Automatically of course. But I don't know why would you want LTS, if system upgrades are usually painless and also automatical.

You can run gog installers or anything with steam-run chroot script. The only con of the system is understanding and reading overhead.

and still better than linux :P

What?!? Has MS removed it recently? I swear I could see it there some time ago...

I still think the Windows 10 user interface is a big mess, incoherent when it can't decide whether it tries to remain in the old UI or the new UI. Windows 10 feels like a transitional phase where MS is hoping to move Windows PC users to using Windows 10 X closed-garden devices. You people want to buy all your software from the Windows Store, you just don't know it yet... Steam and other alternatives to be damned.

I use Slackware current with KDE Plasma, and I´m a longtime KDE user.

According to your specifications, the best way to go would be Kubuntu LTS. This has also the advantage (gaming wise) that Ubuntu is the usual target for most games.

I wouldn´t use Kubuntu but then, I don´t want LTS.

Good luck on your search.

How do rolling releases deal with break points, like how recently and in the near future many Linux distros seem to stop offering a 32bit version of their OSes? (I am unsure if there are many other similar break points like that, but that occurred to me as it is relevant right now for at least Ubuntu and Mint).

For instance, is there some 32bit rolling-release Linux distro which still claims "yep, we will keep updating this indefinitely"? (The Debian-based(?) Q4OS that I recently installed on one 15 year old laptop, at least claims to offer updates for some more years... But I presume it is not a rolling release anyway.).

Or do rolling releases ever decide something like that they will not support some desktop environment (or window manager?) anymore because of reason X, and how do they deal with such changes?

I am sure there are some other similar break points like the introduction of systemd etc., how do rolling releases deal with them? At least to me it has seemed that in e.g. RHEL/CentOS and also Ubuntu there were some quite big changes what they supported and what configuration files were used e.g. for networking, or how RHEL-based distros seem to be moving away from ntpd towards chronyd, or Ubuntu from ntpd to timesyncd, for reasons I don't know... LTS releases normally introduce those breakpoints between the LTS releases.