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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?

1 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Arch... Ugh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Arch breaks. Often. Breakage is the trouble with rolling release distributions, and an intolerable problem for anyone not wanting to spend the time un-breaking things.

    Loyal but naive Arch users are always quick to defend it, "my system has never broken" "you must be doing something wrong" etc. but these discussions are always about semantics. Just because it's a one-liner to fix doesn't mean that it isn't broken. If it requires my attention to keep working, then it's broken. Just because it is fixable doesn't mean I want to spend time fixing it.

    Arch is a great way to learn Linux, and the Arch wiki is a great resource not exclusive to just Arch. But you'd have to be out of your mind to use it for anything in production. The Arch FAQ makes it pretty clear: YOU, the user, is responsible for keeping your system updated, functional and stable; but the more packages you have installed, the more likely you are to get broken when upstream updates something.

    Also from Arch docs:
    Warning: Do not be tempted to perform partial updates, as they are not supported by Arch Linux and may cause instability: the whole system should be upgraded when upgrading a component. Also note that infrequent system updates can complicate the update process.

    Translation: You want to update package foosicle-1.2 to foosicle-1.3 because it has a security problem. Oh, you don't want to update X, Firefox, KDE, and the kernel? I hope you do want instability then. BTW, stay on top of your updates unless you want to get really hosed.

    No thanks.

    I use Ubuntu LTS releases on my computers at work for three reasons:
    1. Reading the Arch wiki to un-fuck Java after I updated my system to fix a security issue for a different package is not a good use of my time.
    2. Not a good use of my time to compile from source because the distribution ships with something ancient or doesn't have it at all (I'm looking at you, RHEL).
    3. Will keep getting updates for the lifetime of the hardware.