My dad uses Ubuntu as an htpc and has livepatch enabled, but every year or so when I visit it’s always out of date. This time it needed a partial patch.
Is Ubuntu just bad, is there a better alternative that’s closer to Windows where the machine are actually kept up to date?
I couldn’t say on the updates for Mint, as I use CachyOS, but I know that lots of people love and recommend it, in part because the opinionated changes it makes almost always have the end user in mind.
I do have experience with Bazzite (a sibling to Aurora), and worrying about updates is virtually zero. That’s because of how the updates actually happen. You’re not modifying the system directly, you’re creating a new image based on an upstream version that was built and tested each time.
The idea is that you have a “master copy” that can be deployed at scale and has some level of guarantee to work. If it doesn’t, you rollback. No downtime, since you should theoretically always have an image that works, even if it’s not up to date.
Whatever you choose, something with KDE Plasma or Cinnamon as the DE would feel the most like Windows.