Linux Mint team considers longer gaps between releases in attempt to accelerate development efforts — current six-month cycle means ‘we spend more time testing, fixing, and releasing than developing’

Linux Mint.

In its latest monthly update, the Linux Mint blog looks back at development over the prior decade. One of the distro’s strengths, according to the author(s), is that the Mint team does things incrementally, making changes slowly. The big news is that this blog post provides a pretty strong signal that the developers want to break from the rigid six-monthly update cycle they have self-imposed. It looks like things are going to get even more incremental and slow. Is this playing to the distro’s strengths, as the blog indicates? Conversely, the blog also suggests that more time between releases will let the Linux Mint team be more ambitious.

Longer development cycle allows for greater ambition