I run Mint 14 "Nadia" on one of my machines. I have no intention to upgrade to Mint 15 at this point.
The problem is, Ubuntu 13.04 is only supported for 9 months, and it's already been a month since the release. Since Mint recommends fresh installs rather than upgrading between releases, it means you'll have less than 8 months to play with it before you must wipe it and move to Mint 16. That's a rather short shelf life for an "ambitious" release.
Since Canonical seems unwilling to support any non-LTS release for more than a few months anymore, it might be a good idea for the Mint team to reconsider their release cycles as well. Perhaps they should stick to LTS releases and work more aggressively on backporting stuff. Perhaps they should finally switch their main distro to a rolling release based on Debian (LMDE). In either case, I don't think there's much point following Ubuntu releases as closely as Mint has done so far.
I agree. I think they should switch to at least Debian testing, if not Sid. There's really nothing to be gained by staying, especially since Mint is currently at the top of Distrowatch.
I use Arch, and I find rolling to be amazing. I love it when I run updates and I get an upgrade to my DE without having to go through a 30-minute or longer upgrade process.
The problem with using Sid is that it's, you know, unstable. Ubuntu does a lot of work to stabilize Sid before each release. If Mint did the same, there would be a lot of duplicated effort so they might as well just use Ubuntu as a base.
The problem with using Debian testing is that it gets stuck in a freeze for 6-10 months every 2 years. It's like stop-and-go traffic. And then, right after a release, testing becomes flooded with so many new packages that it becomes difficult to test them for security or stability. A few serious breaks in the past forced LMDE to adopt an "update pack" approach that lags Debian testing by a few weeks.
If the "always-releasable Debian testing" [1] idea becomes reality, it might be possible to have Linux Mint follow Debian testing and still be highly stable.
I have used sid as my main desktop for over a decade now. To be honest I actually run a mixed system with a few packages (not just one-offs but big things like xmonad/iceweasel/awesome/git/pandoc/git-annex/gitit) from experimental. If it has been a long time (5-7 years) since you tried unstable you can think of experimental as what unstable used to be. When was the last time you tried sid?
When I first made the switch from RH to debian there were occasional issues but these went away as I became more experienced with debian. It has been years since I encountered a bug that caused me to lose more than an hour of productivity. The most recent issue that I have had with unstable was over a year ago and it was simply a matter of pinning a version of libcairo. The only reason I remember this so well is that someone else on HN was having trouble and my comment[1] on how to fix it was my highest rated comment at the time.
I think the point was that it is not their main effort. I was under the impression that LMDE was intended as a parallel effort for the sake of giving the Mint team options in case there is a problem with Ubuntu in the same way that there was an imperfect PowerPC build of Windows NT or an Intel build of OS X long before Apple switched.
Regardless of whether I am completely of base about the intentions, when I last tried LMDE a year ago, I found it easy to break during updates. Though it wasn't difficult to fix my mistakes, the ease with which I was able to make them seemed contrary to the spirit of Mint, as though it didn't yet have a much polish as the main efforts. Things definitely could have changed though.
I share your sentiment. Their progress with the Cinnamon is really cool, and I am really tempted to switch, but at the same time, I don't want to miss out on their (hopefully) even more exciting work on future versions.
The problem is, Ubuntu 13.04 is only supported for 9 months, and it's already been a month since the release. Since Mint recommends fresh installs rather than upgrading between releases, it means you'll have less than 8 months to play with it before you must wipe it and move to Mint 16. That's a rather short shelf life for an "ambitious" release.
Since Canonical seems unwilling to support any non-LTS release for more than a few months anymore, it might be a good idea for the Mint team to reconsider their release cycles as well. Perhaps they should stick to LTS releases and work more aggressively on backporting stuff. Perhaps they should finally switch their main distro to a rolling release based on Debian (LMDE). In either case, I don't think there's much point following Ubuntu releases as closely as Mint has done so far.