What exactly is the point of rolling release? My pc (well, the cpu) is 15 years old, I dont need bleeding edge updates. Or is it for security ?
I follow linux news I like hearing about new features and have them come to my system quickly. I’d hate to have to wait years for anything new. I’m not worried about stability, i run nothing critical and if I have an issue I’ll just fix it.
This is admittedly anecdotal, but my experience with point releases is that things still break, and when they do, you’re often stuck with the broken thing until a new release comes out. For this reason, among others, dist-upgrades tend to be extremely nervewracking.
With a rolling release, not only are fixes for broken things likely to release faster - if something does break, you can pin that package, and only that package, to an older version in the meantime. Then again, I’ve been using Arch almost exclusively on my desktop for about 7 years and I’ve never had to do this. I don’t doubt that things have broken for people, but as far as I’m concerned, Arch just works.
As far as security goes, I don’t think there’s much, if any, advantage. Debian, the stablest of them all, still gets security updates in a timely fashion.
Minimal delay between a program releasing new features or bugfixes and you getting to use them. Even as an avid Debian user, sometimes I get bummed out when they freeze a package for release right before a feature I would have really liked makes it in.
As for security, there’s not a huge difference I’m aware of. On Debian, features stay where they are, but maintainers will backport just the security fixes of each package to the current stable release.
I run Debian Testing so I can report, and very rarely fix, bugs that I find. This way there are less bugs in Debian Stable.
What exactly is the point of stable release? I don’t need everything pinned to specific versions—I’m not running a major corporate web service that needs a 99.9999% uptime guarantee—and Internet security is a moving target that requires constant updates.
Security and bug fixes—especially bug fixes, in my experience—are a good enough reason to go rolling-release even if you don’t usually need bleeding-edge features in your software.
So far I’ve encountered the smoothest OS experience with Arch-based EndeavourOS . Perhaps twice a year something breaks for which the forum or Arch Wiki usually provided the fix within a day. The other 363 days I simply
sudo pacman -Syu --noconfirmandyay --noconfirmin the morning/evening and all is well.Conversely, on Debian, it drives me nuts that one is prevented from updating even if one public key from one unimportant repository is missing or something. This troubleshooting is way harder for beginners than most things I’ve needed to do to fix my EndeavourOS install.
I’ve got a complete Linux beginner to start off with EndeavourOS without problems. She’s even troubleshooting and fixing suddenly non-working Steam games by herself.
In any case, any Linux is better than Windoze. Try different distributions if you’ve got a spare PC to test with and see what fits you. As for desktop environments (DE), I started off with Xfce about ten year ago, used that for many years. Then fell for the KDE Plasma hype for about year—they’re doing great stuff, but a bit too bloated and buggy for my liking, as well as trying to have a KDE app for everything instead of acknowledging some other software is simply better. One can’t be the best at everything. Anyway, then I tested multiple DEs because all of them have exclusively useful features, and the perfect mix between the most prominent ones (Xfce, Plasma, Gnome) I’ve found to be Cinnamon, the default on Linux Mint. For me that’s the perfect beginner friendly DE that also remains highly configurable/extensible to suit experienced users, without being overwhelming/bloated to anyone.
Have fun and build whatever you want in your new awesome sandbox. Screw M$ without restraint nor compassion.
It is not just about your pc hardware. I much prefer running the latest software on it as I regularly use features from tools added in the last version of something. I would hate to have to wait 6 months to a year to be able to use new features that make my life easier. That might not be every bit of software I use but enough core things that I would notice.
For me its especially the DE
Rolling release means that you won’t be forced to reinstall the whole system when the number after the name flips. And you won’t be locked out of some newer version of a package because the distro you use decided they’re cutting off the updates to “old” versions
This…is not accurate. Not being pedantic, just correcting the misunderstanding so you know the difference.
LTS releases are built to be stable on pinned versions of point release kernel and packages. This ensures that a team can expect to not have to worry about major changes or updates for X years.
Rolling Releases are simply updating new packages to whatever versions become available when released. Pretty much the opposite of an expected stable release for any period of time.
Doesn’t have anything to with “forced reinstall” of anything. If you’ve been having to fully reinstall your OS every time a new LTS is released, you are kind of doing extra unnecessary work.
what happens after those x years?
Depends on the exact system but there will be a method to switch to a newer release channel without reinstalling. Rinse and repeat every x years.
- I like having the upstream versions of software instead of it being patched by package maintainers.
- I like having up to date software. It means that issue trackers for software I use are relevant
- Doing distro upgrades when they end support never works gracefully and i have to completely reinstall. I’d rather just use a rolling release which in practice works and is supported indefinitely
- I do like bleeding edge updates. For wine for instance
Yeah, Point 1 here is exactly why I moved from Ubuntu to Arch ~10 years ago.
I was trying to get something working and found that the bug / feature had been fixed ~1 year earlier, but that version wasn’t in the repos… I couldn’t move forwards.
With Arch, all is well. And, I’m either reporting new bugs and helping to get things fixed, or I’m updating the wiki with any changes I notice.
With a rolling release distro you get the most recent upstream stable releases of all your software packages. There is really no blood involved. If you want the risk of blood, you need to install the bloody versions of upstream, i.e. newest git master.
Ubuntu et all on the other hand give you months to years old software. If you’re fine with that 🤷. And on big upgrade, they break install different software and tend to break stuff.
Idk what role hardware age has here.
CPUs are usually fine. It’s the GPUs that need updates faster, especially Nvidia. However I generally love to have new features as soon as possible too. On the other hand, I like the slowest updates as possible on my home server.
I like getting updates and new features? My computer isn’t new by any means. But I tinker with stuff, sometimes bleeding edge technology. Other than that I don’t really care. Rolling release, Debian Stable… I’m fine as long as it does the job. And for half the stuff it doesn’t even matter. I can write a letter with a 5yo LibreOffice or answer mails with any version of the mail client. Just give me modern, up-to-date tools when developing software, and it doesn’t hurt if the slicer knows about my new 3d printer from this year.
- my hardware is pretty new, support for it is shaky on slower distros
- i prefer to do small, generally reliable updates frequently rather than large, failure prone updates infrequently
- although rare, i have run into the wall once or twice on slow release distros, where a program i want to use needs a newer version of a package than my distro supported
- i like pacman, it’s a nice package manager
