Five Reasons Why Rolling Distros Are Better
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Always up to date, only one repo, no version tyranny!
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I do like that it keeps you fully up to date all of the time and makes it hard and weird to try to keep systems intentionally old.
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I've had OpenSuse Tumbleweed actually bork my laptop so I had to wipe & reload it... That's my only reserve about rolling distros.
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@dafyre said in Five Reasons Why Rolling Distros Are Better:
I've had OpenSuse Tumbleweed actually bork my laptop so I had to wipe & reload it... That's my only reserve about rolling distros.
Was it the rolling that did it?
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@mlnews said in Five Reasons Why Rolling Distros Are Better:
Always up to date, only one repo, no version tyranny!
I prefer them too, but there's a major downside: Testing is next to impossible for both, the maintainer and the customer.
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@thwr said in Five Reasons Why Rolling Distros Are Better:
@mlnews said in Five Reasons Why Rolling Distros Are Better:
Always up to date, only one repo, no version tyranny!
I prefer them too, but there's a major downside: Testing is next to impossible for both, the maintainer and the customer.
Testing is rarely done so, not always a bad thing.
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@scottalanmiller said in Five Reasons Why Rolling Distros Are Better:
@thwr said in Five Reasons Why Rolling Distros Are Better:
@mlnews said in Five Reasons Why Rolling Distros Are Better:
Always up to date, only one repo, no version tyranny!
I prefer them too, but there's a major downside: Testing is next to impossible for both, the maintainer and the customer.
Testing is rarely done so, [...]
There are tens of thousands of packages per Distro which can interfere with each other one way or another. I just had an issue where I got a broken packet definition on Debian, a deb file was missing its last line. The system got virtually broken, I couldn't install / purge any other package prior to identifying and fixing the broken definition file.
That's why testing is important. I'm fully aware that this is a huge task and can only be accomplished with automation. I think that's a major reason for RHEL's slow release intervals - not sure though.
not always a bad thing.
Anyway, my point is: Just because testing is rarely done, it doesn't automatically make it a good thing.
Isn't it good practice to test things prior to releasing them? I remember very well some huge issues on Gentoo, where bleeding edge packages can lead to broken systems because of changed config file formats or changed APIs. Don't get me wrong, as I said before, I prefer rolling releases too. But it can be dangerous if you don't pay utmost care.
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@thwr said in Five Reasons Why Rolling Distros Are Better:
Isn't it good practice to test things prior to releasing them?
Not necessarily in the way that it is implied. Testing against very specific, controlled conditions makes it actually very easy to have dependencies that are bad, including dependencies on bugs. Broad testing and rolling testing makes it often easier to make more robust end products.
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@scottalanmiller said in Five Reasons Why Rolling Distros Are Better:
@dafyre said in Five Reasons Why Rolling Distros Are Better:
I've had OpenSuse Tumbleweed actually bork my laptop so I had to wipe & reload it... That's my only reserve about rolling distros.
Was it the rolling that did it?
Sadly, yes. One of the updated packages broke my video drivers (Nvidia Optimus / Bumblebee drivers) and they would recompile to fix it... The Last straw for me was the next update I ran a week or so later updated the Kernel and caused the video to flash incessantly unless I had an app on the screen that was using the NVIDIA GPU. It was odd...
I wiped and did a Mint 18 install after that, lol.
Edit: I do know the flashing video bug has been fixed.
