Debian Stable is only supported for 3 years really and then 2 more years by the LTS team. The kernel and perhaps a few core libraries can supported up to 10 years by The Linux Foundation.
You really need to migrate to newer versions every 3 - 5 years. Perhaps by “reinstall” you mean having to wipe and start over.
I put LMDE on my mother’s machine about 8 months ago. I think it has only been restarted twice and once was a power outage. She uses it daily.
All the normal folks I have moved over use Mint. It is not the distro I use. It has worked great for them. No complaints.
In terms of timeline, you are right. However, I think that change was pretty obviously a continuation of Red Hat’s strategy. No IBM meddling required in my view.
You could also state the situation quite differently.
First, you could point out that Red Hat announced a developer license that offered up to 16 installations of RHEL for free. Press releases at the time quoted Red Hat execs saying they were not interested in going after users of “just a few servers”. Many of the users of CentOS at the time could have migrated to the real thing for free. These programs have only expanded. You can use Podman, Docker, or Distrobox to create an unlimited number of official RHEL instances without any commercial restriction.
Second, Red Hat founded the CenttOS Stream project, moving their active development much more into the open. They shifted significant investment into this project. All the explanations at the time were about streamlining the development and engineering process.
Third, Red Hat has increased the amount of GPL code they have contributed since then and started several new wildly popular projects all licensed under the GPL.
Forth, they continued to explicitly and openly publish (for many years) all the input assets that CentOS was built from. This is how so many CentOS replacements were able to so quickly appear (Rocky, Scientific-now Alma, etc). IBM stopped directly paying for CentOS but did very little to kill it beyond that.
If you were paying attention to any of the above, you may have missed a dramatic shift in behaviour and values resulting from the IBM acquisition.
It does seem that IBM may be asserting themselves more now. That said, it is worth noting that they are only assimilating support services (legal, finance, Ops, IT, HR). The engineering and product teams (and their leadership) remain independent. Optimistically, this will not impact the Red Hat technology or community strategy. This is all pretty standard “economy of scale” stuff aimed at saving a bit of money on duplicated infrastructure. No immediate cause for alarm that it indicates a shift in strategy or even a desire for greater control by IBM corporate.
All that said, it is hard to imagine that departments like legal and HR reporting directly into IBM will not result cultural influence at Red Hat that will inevitably bleed into the product side. It will certainly change the experience of being a Red Hat employee.
I worry more about the unintended consequences. I am not a Red Hat customer. I do not use RHEL or Fedora. However, I recognize that Red Hat is the primary author of a lot of the software that I use. I do not even use GCC, Glibc, GNOME, or Systemd (all completely controlled by Red Hat) but I still rely on A LOT of their stuff.
The fact that you had no idea is pretty good evidence that IBM buying them has not changed much about them.
Distrobox allows you to run the userland of a different distro in a container, like Docker.
Different than Docker, the container sees your /home and talks to your local display server.
As an example, you can enter an Arch Linux Distrobox on another distro (say Debian) on the command line. You are now in an Arch terminal. You can run pacman for example and install software from the Arch repos or the AUR. If it is GUI software, you can launch it and it shows up as a regular window in your display. And if you want to load or save files, the /home you see is the real one from your host system.
What is cool is that you can run Distrobox-export inside Distrobox to export an application to your host. It will create an entry in the app menu of your host desktop environment (eg. KDE). Once you have done that, you can launch the application anytime and it will just run and appear on your screen like any other application. Except, under the hood, it is really running in a container on top ot the userland of a different distro.
You can think of it like Flatpak but where you can install the apps from a real Linux distro and not just FlatHub.
So you can run Fedora KDE and use an Ubuntu Distrobox to run those missing apps that are keeping you on Ubuntu. Be free.
I mentioned Arch as I often use Distrobox to get access to the AUR on other distros. For example, I use Chimera Linux which uses MUSL instead of Glibc. If there is something that would not run on MUSL, I can just install it via Distrobox instead (which will run that app on Glibc on my otherwise MUSL system).
But you can use whatever Distro you want. I could be installing Fedora packages instead. Or maybe you are forced to use Arch but hate all the up to date packages. You could use Distrobox to install all the Debian ones instead.
You can mix and match if you want. You can use Distrobox for more than one Distro.
Or you can create a Distrobox for a specific purpose. Love Mint but need to develop apps for RHEL? Run RHEL in a Distrobox and do your dev there.
Mostly I use the packages from my distro. But if something is missing, or the version is too old, Distrobox to the rescue.
The Debian safety net is not to use third-party repos at all.
Sound strategy. So no arguing.
That said, Debian 13 has effectively been available for many months now. It did not just spring into the world as Debian is developed quite slowly and completely out in the open. The biggest difference when it becomes “official” is that a wider audience tries it.
So we cannot all just “wait and see”. Somebody has to use it and report back.
What is outdated about Cinnamon?
Have you heard of Distrobox?
You can run Debian and still get access to the AUR. I moved from Arch to Chimera Linux and but I still get a few things out of the AUR.
With Distrobox export, you can even add them into the app menu in KDE. So you do not even have to manually launch Distrobox to use them.
I moved my mother to Mint a few months ago. I have not had a single tech support call. She uses it daily. About a week in I asked her how it was going. She liked that printing worked more reliably and wished the scroll bars in Facebook were a bit thicker. Her printer used to show as offline sometimes in Windows but that issue has gone away under Mint. I was going to look for a theme with thicker scroll bars but she told me not to bother.
Granted she was a Firefox and Thunderbird user already so that helped with the transition.
Can you get Distrobox running on it. If so, put whatever distro you want on Distrobox and build whatever tools you need in there (including a totally different GCC or Clang toolchain).
If you want to scan for vulnerable systems online, here is a list of operating systems that will not be applying these “privilege escalation” fixes.
Have you heard of Distrobox?
Agreed.
Though if you get off the beaten path, you get things like system supervisor, system compiler, C library, and core utils.
But most Linux distros are systemd, GCC, Glibc, and GNU utils. Which brings us back to your list.
They are aiming for complete compatibility. They literally use the GNU test suite.
You are 90% of the way there.
Just keep your system up to date (update packages weekly maybe) and you will be fine. The system mostly manages itself.
I recommend installing both the current kernel and an LTS kernel. If you ever have a problem with a driver or a filesystem or something after an update, just boot into LTS and you are back up and running.
Unlike the Wine based stuff (Bottles, Winetricks), this runs actual Windows as a VM. So compatibility will be far better though performance will be worse.
Linux Mint Debian edition. Best of both worlds.