Long term experience reports with rolling release distro wanted

[simonlang]

i am looking for long term experience reports with distros based on the rolling release concept, preferably arch with pacman and with long term i mean not a month but quite a bit more.

what i don't get is that i read both ways: broken dependencies more with a rolling release concept (the argument here: it's bleeding edge and potentially untested packages getting installed) or more with a lts classical ubuntu system (because no updates just security fixes and if you add some ppa's which i do quite often, you are lost)

 

looking forward to read your reports thanks.

[Max Norris]

I've used Arch for a couple of years, yea rolling releases can be a double-edged sword. Applications usually aren't so bad, they tend to get fixed pretty quickly or if it's really bad you can usually downgrade again. It's the core OS that can really blow up in your face when there's a major change.. the switch to Systemd a couple years back for example, sometimes there's other breaking updates that require manual intervention before processing, packages get renamed/reorganized, etc. Really need to follow their news feed and watch for the ones that can be problematic, it comes up from time to time.. regular backups are definitely a major plus.  If you blindly run pacman -Syyu without a second though, well, you're rolling the dice.

Personally I prefer a "partial rolling" release setup, as with Chakra, FreeBSD, etc. It's a stable core that's updated every so often, but the userland stuff is rolling release and updated much faster. A happy compromise that'll give you the latest and greatest without worrying about if an update will render your system unbootable.

[f0rk_b0mb]

I've used Arch for a couple of years, yea rolling releases can be a double-edged sword. Applications usually aren't so bad, they tend to get fixed pretty quickly or if it's really bad you can usually downgrade again. It's the core OS that can really blow up in your face when there's a major change.. the switch to Systemd a couple years back for example, sometimes there's other breaking updates that require manual intervention before processing, packages get renamed/reorganized, etc. Really need to follow their news feed and watch for the ones that can be problematic, it comes up from time to time.. regular backups are definitely a major plus.  If you blindly run pacman -Syyu without a second though, well, you're rolling the dice.

Personally I prefer a "partial rolling" release setup, as with Chakra, FreeBSD, etc. It's a stable core that's updated every so often, but the userland stuff is rolling release and updated much faster. A happy compromise that'll give you the latest and greatest without worrying about if an update will render your system unbootable.

 

When I used it Chakra was pretty damn good.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

I've used Arch for a couple of years, yea rolling releases can be a double-edged sword. Applications usually aren't so bad, they tend to get fixed pretty quickly or if it's really bad you can usually downgrade again. It's the core OS that can really blow up in your face when there's a major change.. the switch to Systemd a couple years back for example, sometimes there's other breaking updates that require manual intervention before processing, packages get renamed/reorganized, etc. Really need to follow their news feed and watch for the ones that can be problematic, it comes up from time to time.. regular backups are definitely a major plus. If you blindly run pacman -Syyu without a second though, well, you're rolling the dice.

Personally I prefer a "partial rolling" release setup, as with Chakra, FreeBSD, etc. It's a stable core that's updated every so often, but the userland stuff is rolling release and updated much faster. A happy compromise that'll give you the latest and greatest without worrying about if an update will render your system unbootable.

Posts like this makes me love neowin.

Answers for everybody. I've been thinking about this since 10 came along. Genuinely, thank you.

[simplezz]

I rarely encounter breaks and I've been using Arch for at least 5 years. And even when you do, the Arch website usually has fix on the front page. It's so much better than having to do one big upgrade bi-annually which is tedious and often painful.

As for bleeding edge, packages in core/extra/community are normally very stable. AUR git packages on the other hand are bleeding edge and consequently can break. Though if you look at the AUR package comments, you can find out beforehand of any showstopping bugs.

[simonlang]

it will be learning by doing agains like all linux stuff. as i am on a cautious approach right now i will try it a bit longer in vbox and see how it goes. decide later.

[PGHammer]

it will be learning by doing agains like all linux stuff. as i am on a cautious approach right now i will try it a bit longer in vbox and see how it goes. decide later.

My favorite release currently is a rolling-release, and it's based on - of all things - Gentoo; specifically, it's Sabayon Linux.

If I were ever to kick Windows completely to the curb, Sabayon would be my Linux distribution of choice, for several reasons.

 

1.  Gentoo meets Ubuntu?  One rather surprising thing about Sabayon is that it is both more customizable than an identical spin of Ubuntu without being hyper-technical - it replaced Kubuntu as my distribution of choice for that precise reason.  It also has influences on non-Gentoo distributions - including Ubuntu PPAs (and those for other Debian-based distributions as well - if anything, Sabayon is the BIGGEST influence on PPAs in general).  I originally called it "a better Kubuntu than Kubuntu" - and I have seen nothing yet that would change my opinion.

 

2.  Proceed at your own pace.  One rather surprising thing about Sabayon - and especially given its Gentoo roots - is that it can be used in "coward" mode rather easily; not exactly something expected of Gentoo, and especially a Gentoo-based distribution.  This has been something that Gentoo itself has failed miserably in - and even Kubuntu has issues as you advance out of the newbie stage.  One thing I like about Sabayon is that it totally embraces Steam - which is something that few other non-Valve Linux distributions have done; if I were ever to build a BYO Steam Machine, I would likely base it on Sabayon; not SteamOS - mainly because I can use KDE as the desktop default (as opposed to Valve's choice of GNOME).  I don't hate GNOME, or SteamOS for that matter; I just prefer KDE as a desktop environment.

 

3.  Hardware support - Sabayon has also led most Linux distributions in terms of hardware support - from older to modern.  In fact, the biggest reason I prefer Sabayon to SteamOS as a Steam Machine core is the better audio support than SteamOS - rather embarrassing, that.