 One of the dirty little secrets about desktop Linux users is that there is a large percentage of desktop Linux users that never update their machines. They're running horribly out of date software on their operating systems, or in some cases, those Linux operating systems that they're running have actually reached their end of life. These operating systems no longer receive security updates, therefore, these Linux distributions that these people are running, they're vulnerable, right? They're wide open to potential attacks. I think the reason a lot of desktop Linux users don't update their computers is because a lot of them don't consider it necessary, because most desktop Linux users run static release distributions, right? The kings on the desktop are the Ubuntu-based distributions, Ubuntu and the hundreds of Ubuntu-based distributions, and in many cases, Debian-based distributions are also very new user-friendly, and they're all, for the most part, static release distributions, meaning that once or twice a year, you get a new release, and a lot of users don't bother doing like the daily or weekly updates, right? They install the new version of Ubuntu or the new version of Linux Mint or whatever it happens to be, and they run that sometimes until the next version is released, and then they either do an update, a just gigantic update from one version to the next, or in some cases, they just format the drive and reinstall the next version. But many users, again, a large percentage of these users don't even do that, a very large percentage compared to what most people probably think. There are many people that are running Ubuntu versions. I know for a fact, because I've talked to these people through emails, I see them on support forums, I've talked to viewers of my channel that are running ancient versions of Ubuntu. Ubuntu, most people run the LTS releases, right? So the latest LTS is 2004, but many, many, many millions of people are probably still running 1804. That's fine. It's still supported. There's probably millions of people still on 1604. That thing is, if it hasn't reached end of life, it's getting close, although I don't know, can you extend the five-year support to 10-year on 1604? I forget when they made the change from five-year support to 10-year support. But 1404, I know, wasn't a 10-year support release, and I still talk to people sometimes that are running 1404 Ubuntu. That's crazy. That operating system now is 2021. That operating system is seven years old. I'm pretty sure the repositories were turned off two, three years ago. So why are these people on these end-of-life Linux distributions? And that is the problem. Just today, I noticed that the Linux Mint team posted a blog. This blog is titled, Update Your Computer, and this was posted by Clem, the founder of Linux Mint. And at the beginning of the blog post, the TLDR basically states that security updates are important, that stats tell us, the Linux Mint team in this case, that they're not being applied by all users. So they know that there are users because they see who's hitting the repositories for updates and downloading software, and they know that a large percentage of their users are not applying the updates that are out there that are available. And they're asking people to apply updates right now. If you have not applied an update to your machine, and especially if you're running a static release distribution, right? So sometimes you can go weeks or months without doing updates on these things because it's not like your machine breaks, right? You could go a year or two sometimes, not even think about an update. That's bad. Go and apply those updates right now. And if you are on a Linux distribution, an old version of Linux Mint in this case, or old version of Ubuntu that has reached end of life, so it's no longer supported at all, update to the latest version, or at least for Ubuntu, update to the latest LTS for Linux Mint, update to their latest version, which I believe is version 20.1. And in this blog post, they mention that a large percentage of their users, let me see if I can find the percentage because the percentages are crazy. They say about 30% of their users apply updates in less than a week. So three in 10 apply their updates in a timely fashion, say a week or less. But they say somewhere between five and 30% of their users, they're not exactly sure they can't pin it down, but they think it's somewhere between 5% and 30% of the users that run Linux Mint are running Linux Mint 17.something, you know, one of the point releases for the 17 series. Linux Mint is on the 20 series, right? So these people are running a very old version of Linux Mint that actually reached end of life, April of 2019. Almost two years ago, these versions of Linux Mint reached end of life. Why are these people still on that version of Linux Mint? Now, I have some thoughts about this as somebody that obviously promotes Linux to the masses. And I often convert new to Linux users over to using Linux. And I install these new user friendly distributions on these people's machines. Some of my go-tos that I install often on new Linux users, computers, are Ubuntu, the various versions of Ubuntu. Linux Mint, MX Linux, Linux Lite. I've installed a lot of those distributions many times on friends and family computers. And all of those are your standard Debian slash Ubuntu based distributions. And they're on a static release model. And a lot of times you give these laptops to these new users, right? They bring you their virus riddled Windows 7 laptop that no longer works, right? And you put Linux Mint on it and you give it back to them. And did you tell them about updates? Did you explain to them the importance of updates? I can tell you many times, I don't. A lot of times I just show them how to use the computer because when you hand them a brand new operating system, what's the first thing you tell them? Well, you show them how to get to the web browser, right? That's all they want to know. How do they open up Firefox or Chrome? How do they get to their face page so they can chat with their friends and do all that social media crap? Does Netflix work? That's what they want to know about. They don't want to know about the dirty things that go on under the hood. You know, they don't want to know about updating the system. Not right. Even if you told them about it, it would probably be in one ear out the other. So unless you are somebody that can actively support that machine, there is a good chance that a lot of those machines that you've wiped out Windows and installed Linux on for friends or family, I would say probably most of those machines have never been updated. And I know this for a fact because of, you know, having installed Linux on dozens of different machines for different people, you know, sometimes I get those machines back and it's exactly the way it was when I, you know, first installed the operating system. They haven't done anything to the, they haven't even changed the wallpaper in some cases, much less updated that operating system. I really think that we the community have not done a good enough job explaining, especially to the newer to Linux crowd, how important security updates, especially are on their machines, you know, they're used to never updating anything, especially when you came from Windows, you didn't really have to worry about updates on the older versions of Windows, the new versions of Windows, Windows 10, you know, does the automatic updating thing where it just updates whenever the hell it wants to, you know, it's different though on Linux because it doesn't update when you don't want it to. It also doesn't update automatically unless you went in and specifically set it to update automatically and maybe that's what we need to start telling people is just go ahead and turn on automatic updating, maybe more distributions, static release distributions, maybe they need to have automatic updating turned on by default. I don't know, I'm just putting that out there. I don't know if that's the answer or not. I do know that those of us that have a voice in the community, you know, people like me, I have a YouTube channel, it gets a lot of views. And, you know, maybe I need to occasionally remind people to update their systems and that's what the Linux Mint team is actually doing in this blog. Obviously, they're getting the message out to their folks, but even people that are not running Linux Mint, which is why you know, I'm showing this Linux Mint blog post on this video, it doesn't matter what Linux distribution you're running. I expect most people that are running a rolling release distribution, so Arch or any Arch-based distribution, Gen2 or any Gen2-based distribution, I expect those folks stay updated. You don't run a rolling release distribution typically without frequently updating because you know you can't go weeks or especially months without updating your system. If you do, you're going to have potentially hundreds, maybe thousands of updates available to you at some point and updating that many packages can break things. So people that run rolling release distributions typically stay updated. It's really the new user friendly distributions. It's you know, the Ubuntu's, the Mint's, the elementary, you know, Mx, that kind of crowd that really need to hear this message and the Linux Mint blog post here goes through some steps on what you need to do, especially if you're one of these people that have gone weeks or months without updating your system. You want to take some precautions before you do this massive update. The first thing you want to do, check your version of Linux Mint in this case or Ubuntu or whatever it is you're running. If you're not sure if the version you're running is end of life or you're not even sure what version you're running, you can quickly figure out what version your distribution is on by running this command here in the terminal lsb underscore release space dash r will give you the release of your current Linux distribution. If it's a static release distribution, if you're running a rolling release distribution like I'm on Arco Linux, if I ran this in the terminal for Arco, it's not going to give me anything because they don't have, they don't really have releases. It's arch-based. Arch doesn't have a release. So if I did lsb underscore release dash r here, I'm just going to get rolling as the release version. That's not really the version I'm running. It's just, hey, we don't have versions. It's just constantly rolling along. But those of you that do this in Mint, you know, you're going to get 20.0, 20.1, whatever version you're on on Ubuntu, you're going to get 20.04, 20.10 or whatever you happen to be running. Now, if you run that command, that lsb underscore release command, and you get the version of your Linux distribution, and it hasn't reached end of life, so it's still getting updates, then go ahead and update your machine. But if it's been a long, long time since you've updated the machine, maybe you have never updated the machine since installing the operating system. Instead of just blindly running the update, you may want to take precautions. And what the Linux Mint team suggests doing, and I suggest this too, is installing a program called TimeShift before you actually do the upgrade. That way, if something goes wrong, TimeShift actually takes a snapshot of your current system. Your current system that's working right now, right? Say you do the upgrade and things are horribly broken, while TimeShift can go back to that previous snapshot where things were still working and everything will be fine again. So that's what I would do before running the apt update and and apt upgrade on Debian or Ubuntu-based distributions. One of the problems with people not wanting to upgrade is a lot of these people think that you have to do this in the terminal. Most of these new user-friendly distributions, you don't have to go in the terminal and do a pseudo apt update and and pseudo apt upgrade. Most of them have graphical applications that update the system for you that I mean, that's what Linux Mint has. If I go through here, they even have screenshots of their update manager. You just open up the update manager. It's going to tell you, hey, do you want to update your system? You hit OK. It may give you a list of the programs that it's updating, but you really don't have to do anything. You just hit OK. It will update your system for you. Those of you that don't mind typing in the terminal, it's really not complicated. I can give you the command because I know 90% of you, especially if you're running a static release distribution and you haven't updated your system in a long time, you're running a Debian-based system. So let me open up a terminal. Run this command here, pseudo apt update and and pseudo apt upgrade. Run that one command. It will sync the repositories and then it will upgrade all the packages on your system that have an upgrade available. I can't actually run this command because I'm not actually on a Debian based system, but I was just giving you the command for those of you that are running an ARCH or an ARCH based system and you haven't upgraded your system in a while. All you need to do is just do a sudo pacman-capital s lowercase y lowercase u. But again, I don't expect many people that run rolling release distributions to have this problem because I think most people go into something like ARCH realizing you need to keep your system up to date. And when I say this is a Linux desktop problem, of course that's not entirely accurate because I do see people, I've mentioned people bring me their Windows laptops, their Windows laptops and they want me to put Linux on it to fix their Windows laptops. And sometimes the version of Windows that these people are running are often versions of Windows that no longer see support. I still see people bringing me machines that have Windows XP on them. Windows XP was released in 2001. So it's not just a Linux problem. It's all computer users, right? What I suggest though, those of you that are active in the Linux community and you run a static release distribution on your computer and you're active in your distributions community, you're active in their IRC chat or their forums, or you just see people in real life running these various static release distributions. Ask these people, Hey, have you done an update? You know, just it's like, you know, when you see people driving, you know, they're about to get in a car, take a trip. Hey, where are your seatbelt? You know, you just give them that little tip that safety tip. We should be doing this with our computers too. Hey, have you updated your machine today? Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Absi, Dallas, Devon, Fran, Gabe, Luke, or Benny and Mitchell, Alan, Akami, Archie, Chuck, David, the other David, Donnie, Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, Pickviem, Scott, Wesson, Willie, all of these guys, they keep their systems up to date. They do weekly, if not daily upgrades on their machines. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons without these guys. This episode wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. If you'd like to support my work, look for Distro Tube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. I wonder if my TempleOSVM is up to date.