Unvanquished Beta - help installing

What is the output when you type:

lsb_release -i -r -c

If you are on Mint 16, I think it should say Saucy, as it is based on Ubuntu 13.10 if I'm not mistaken.

If Saucy is in your output, then you can simply follow the instructions there for Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives, just replace RELEASE with Saucy (provided that is the output of the above mentioned command), and you should be able to follow the commands there.

I am honestly not sure what might happen when using the wrong release, there will probably be some dependency issues then as I suspect the repository is statically built against the current library versions in the distro.

The safest step would be to run the command first to see what output you get.

I am going to assume that you can follow the instructions then and using quantal as RELEASE.

You may want to keep in mind that it says quantal will not be released as of january 2014 on the website for Unvanquished.

Booman, Ubuntu 13.10 is not a LTS release.

Ubuntu 12.04 is one, and the very next will be 14.04.

Yes, Mint 16 is based on Ubuntu 13.10, which will be supported by Canonical only for 9 months.

They used to support the LTS releases for 3 years, and the "normal" one for 18 months.
From 12.04 the support for LTS versions has been extended to 5 years, and as I said for the others is only 9 months.

That's why I stick with 12.04 as my main OS on my 3 computers, although I still like some distro hopping on some partitions.

I checked the Wikipedia Ubuntu page and it appears that Ubuntu 12.10 (and by extension Mint 14) is supported until April 2014.

If you don't have any compelling reason to upgrade (better hardware support for example) I would wait for Mint 17 which should be based on Ubuntu 14.04 and thus supported for 5 years.

Now with the PPA system is so easy to keep most software updated that in my opinion is not worth the hassle of upgrading the distro every 6 months or so.

Sorry for the late reply, but why would it look bad for this website?

Your Mint is not an outdated distro, is still currently supported so I don't think that would make any difference.
The only thing I would check is if is still possible to upgrade to the latest Nvidia driver, if necessary.

The alternative is a bleeding edge OS like Darendin's Arch Linux, which if I am not mistaken follows a rolling release model.

As long as your release is supported, then there is no problem following it. However, once it is no longer supported, it means it will no longer receive security updates or bugfixes. The reason why they follow such a release cycle that force you to in effect reinstall, is that it provides greater stability. Each release use one kernel, they apply security and bugfixes to it, but the base kernel version is not changed. After a certain amount of time, upstream sources no longer even provide the older versions, and to keep supporting a specific distro release with those versions, it means the distro maintainer would need to start maintaining software packages too.

That makes it a lot easier to simply find stable new versions that have received bugfixes and security fixes from upstream, and make a new release every 6 months.

And yep, Arch is rolling release. This means I never have to install a new version as Arch is continually updating almost as soon as new versions are available from upstream. Rolling release is not always unstable, if the distro repositories keep packages in testing for a long time, however with Arch this is not always the case. I remember when the 3.10 kernel came out. I rebooted, and when I started x, my computer died. I made a couple of attempts, with the same results. I was about to panic, believing my GPU could have been damaged, so I downgraded to the previous kernel and things worked wonderfully again. It turned out there was a problem with certain laptop models with nvidia GPU's and the 3.10 kernel when using proprietary nvidia drivers. Apparently nvidia have yet to figure it out as the forum topic is now 8 pages long on nvidia forums. However, with the 3.11.1 kernel things were working great again and I could get back to keeping everything updated.

I always have a USB ready with the Arch Live media on it, set up for UEFI boot so I can always boot with that in case a new kernel prevents me from booting at all. So I could just chroot in from the Live medium and downgrade. I think you have to enjoy struggling to like Arch, haha. For the most part things are stable and work great, since I started using Arch that's the only problem I've had.

There are other rolling release distros that follow a much more stable approach. I believe Linux Mint Debian is semi-rolling release, and definitely much easier than Arch. There is also Manjaro, which is based on Arch, but is more conservative about releasing new versions from testing until they are proven more stable. That's the thing with open source software that is not developed commercially, there is very little testing done so it's up to the users to test it and report bugs. This is why most distros have a conservative approach to new versions, especially the beginner friendly distros.

To my knowledge, there were no issues at all with the 325 nvidia drivers so I would not worry about that. The package manager used by Debian/Ubuntu/Mint works very well as far as I know, I don't think you should have any problems installing new drivers as long as you do it with the package manager, for example using PPA if the driver version you want is not in the official repositories.

And when it comes to new releases, you can stick to one as long as it is supported, and when you do upgrade to the next release, you can simply make sure it has been out for 1-2 months and you can rest easy that there will not be any serious bugs.

I actually recently installed Mint 16 on my mothers laptop and she seems to love it. I had previously installed Ubuntu for her, but it would periodically spam crash reports. I have also read a lot of negative criticism about the Unity desktop, and others were experiencing crash reports popping up a lot with certain laptops too. Since I installed Mint for her there have not been any issues.

And I would definitely advice all Linux newcomers to stay far away from Arch. Arch is a project and you have to enjoy it and be willing to maintain your OS yourself. It almost becomes a hobby on its own.

Synaptic is just the graphical front-end to apt, which is used by Debian and Ubuntu. And from what I've read it really is a very stable and well working package manager that handles package upgrades very well.

The reason why you don't see newer drivers is because you're still on Mint 14, Mint 14 have specific software repositories, for newer versions you would need to upgrade to a newer release. Or you can use a PPA. If you've never used a PPA before, it really is very simple. It basically adds another repository for your package manager to allow you to easily install software. Actually, I checked the xorg-edgers PPA and they only seem to have the 331.20 driver now. I am using that driver now, and the issues I had seems to have become less frequent with the newest kernel version. No zombies for a boot that has lasted for almost 2 days, and the terminal is behaving better.

Considering the number of issues reported on the nvidia forums with the newest driver, I would suggest waiting until they release a new version with some bugfixes.

You could install 325 yourself if you know how to do it. Like I said, 325 was very stable, I don't recall any specific issues reported on Arch forums when it was being used, and many archers are still using it because of minor issues with 331.