Linux update installed older version of micro

[mkerna]

I have Linux Mint 21.1 installed and I recently updated my installation of micro from 2.0.9 to 2.0.14. Then, today, Linux said I had updates to install, so I installed them. But...this "update" included micro version 2.0.9. I don't understand.

Why did it even include micro, since it isn't part of the Mint repo. I had installed micro myself.
Also, why did it install 2.0.9??!!

[bartgrantham]

This seems like a question for the Linux Mint maintainers, not the developers of micro.

[mkerna]

Okay, thanks.

[Andriamanitra]

The package manager (apt) only knows about the packages you have installed through the package manager itself. If you add programs to /usr/bin/ on your own those are at risk of conflicting with binaries installed by the package manager. This is why it's preferable to place your own binaries under /usr/local/bin/ instead. I suspect you have at some point installed micro by running apt install micro so apt thinks /usr/bin/micro is under its control.

As for why the version is so badly out-of-date, that's because Linux Mint, and Ubuntu which it is based on, follow fixed release model (as opposed to rolling release model). In fixed release model you only get security updates until you update the whole operating system to a new version (for example Linux Mint 22.1). The idea is that this should help with interoperability between packages. Linux Mint and Ubuntu are also rather slow to update their packages in general, it's not uncommon for them to be several versions behind latest upstream releases.

In any case there is nothing micro itself can do about this. You may contact your distribution's package maintainers and ask them to update it, or just uninstall the version managed by the package manager (apt remove micro) and manage the installation of micro yourself (preferably under /usr/local/bin/ like I said earlier). Or you could use a third party package manager that is better at keeping their packages up to date, for example nix or flatpak or snap.

[mkerna]

Thanks for that detailed explanation.