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Greg KH Favors Rolling Release Distros

Posted by timothy on from the as-long-as-the-hill-is-gentle dept.

jones_supa writes In an interesting Google+ post, the lieutenant Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman mentions him fully moving to rolling-release Linux distributions: 'Finally retired my last 'traditional' Linux distro box yesterday, it's all 'rolling-release' Linux systems for me. Feels good. And to preempt the ask, it's Arch Linux almost everywhere (laptop, workstation, cloud servers), CoreOS (cloud server), and Gentoo for the remaining few (laptop, server under my desk).' What's your experience? Would in the current situation a rolling-release operating system indeed be the optimal choice?

6 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Uh by Chess_the_cat · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don't bother clicking the link. The *entire* post is contained in the summary.

    --
    Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
  2. So much for stability and uptimes... by TWX · · Score: 5, Informative

    There was an era, probably inherited from the big-iron computing model, where we strived for stability and long uptimes. We didn't install things that we didn't need (with the exception of Fortune perhaps) and locked-down the box at the network stack. Granted, it required a lot of knowledge at the beginning to make sure that the box was indeed secure, but we were proud of setting up a good, usable box that didn't need a lot of maintenance after the fact.

    I guess that era is now gone, with rapid-release and lots of little things constantly needing the system to restart.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    1. Re:So much for stability and uptimes... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Informative

      Some of us still work in environments where constant restarts are strictly not allowed, and software which expects to be on a constant release cycle is shunned.

      We had a vendor once, who wrote a component for a large enterprise system ... they released builds pretty much weekly and thought that was grand.

      We filed a bug once, and they said "we don't support that version because it's a month old, and therefore 4 versions out of date, you need to upgrade". We said "you'll be hearing from our lawyers because we don't take a prod outage every week just for you idiots". Needless to say, they quickly realized they were going to lose that fight.

      Sorry, we need a lot more stability, and we don't care if you think you're on an agile cycle. It takes around two months to promote something through to Production ... we simply don't care that you want to build weekly.

      Not all places (specifically most regulated industries) have the ability to have stuff constantly changing underneath them, and they certainly haven't got the patience for some company who thinks a product lifecycle is measured in weeks.

      Continuous releases often have the effect of making your customers your beta testers. And we can't do that for you.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re: So much for stability and uptimes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Using separate apps and libraries which have strict and unavoidable dependencies between them isn't "modularity".

      Modularity requires those components to be very loosely coupled.

      For example, GNOME consists of many separate libraries, apps, and scripts, but it isn't modular. Installing just one small GNOME app means you have to pull in tons of libraries and other apps, because they are tightly coupled.

      Systemd is similar to GNOME. It's an all-or-nothing situation, which obviously isn't modular.

      Traditional UNIX software generally is modular. I can easily change my shell, for example, without affecting the other software on the system. I can even install a different C compiler, and none of the other software on the system would even be aware of the change. That's true modularity.

  3. Re:G+ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    It seems to be popular among kernel developers. This guy uses it too...

  4. Void Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Try Void Linux, a rolling distro that doesn't suck:

    - System-wide LibreSSL by default (maybe the first linux distro to do so)
    - runit instead of systemd
    - multilib aware ... and more.