- This topic has 25 replies, 11 voices, and was last updated Dec 27-10:01 pm by BobC.
-
Posts
-
Zeiss Ikon
I used AntiX years ago — 2011 to 2014, maybe a bit longer, because the older of my two desktop machines was too old/slow/small to run Mepis 11 or Kubuntu 14.04. Then technology caught up with me, and my KVM switch wasn’t compatible and the second machine (266 MHz, 768 MB RAM) didn’t get used for a long time (it’s still under my desk, waiting for upgrades).
Now I’m getting annoyed with Ubuntu — they still haven’t really grasped the meaning of “upgrade” in the way Windows had done almost thirty years ago, in terms of being able to automatically install up to the next OS version and keep all (or almost all) installed applications intact. No, if I want to upgrade my 16.04 Mate system (installed in early 2017) to 20.04, I pretty well have to do a complete clean install from ground up, including my hundreds of after-installation packages. Yes, I can fairly readily export a list of installed packages — I did that last time I did this, and it saved me missing an app I was certain I’d had six months or so later and having to re-research what would do what I needed, but for an OS that’s intended to replace Windows, it doesn’t do the same job at least as well, at least in the updates department.
So, I read that Antix is now available in a “rolling distro” format — but without requiring me to live on the bleeding edge with “unstable” or “testing” repos. My (fairly low) level of comfort with the Linux command line is all based on Debian, so I need to stick with a Debian-based distro, and there aren’t many of those that are rolling — and even fewer that are based on “stable”.
I currently like the Mate desktop (which has changed a bit since the one that was in Ubuntu 16.04, but the current version hasn’t lost all its good stuff the way KDE Plasma did when version 5 came out), which is fairly trivial to add to Antix Base or Core (I think); the big question is, is Antix Rolling actually rolling? I’ve read references to “periodic upgrades”. Will I be able to stick with Antix Rolling for longer than four-five years, stay up to date so new software doesn’t complain about new stuff I don’t have because it didn’t get backported (or didn’t automatically install if it did), and not have to install from ground up again any time soon? Or am I chasing a mythical beast?
Anonymous
I read that Antix is now available in a “rolling distro” format
Where did you read that?
Did wherever literally state that? Maybe it read as “available in a roll your own…”chasing a mythical beast?
Regardless which distribution, perhaps you are suffering from “unreasonable expectations”.
Zeiss Ikon
I read that Antix is now available in a “rolling distro” format
Where did you read that?
Did wherever literally state that? Maybe it read as “available in a roll your own…”I read it in a list of Debian based rolling distros, less than year old. Are they making stuff up?
finds the word “rolling” mentioned within an antiX release announcement, once, allaway back in 2008
Are they making stuff up?
Oh gosh, no… they are just disseminating “alternative facts“
searchbox on forum mainpage finds:
topic (Nov 2020) titled “Rolling release in antiX”
https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/rolling-release-in-antix/and, excerpted from another recent topic:
https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/rolling-release-in-antix/#post-45646
anticapitalista wrote:If you choose ‘rolling’ ie testing or sid, then you should be prepared to fix any breakage (it will happen because that is how Debian testing/sid works).
…and plenty more that you might care to read while I go and finish wrapping elves.
BitJam
I need to stick with a Debian-based distro, and there aren’t many of those that are rolling — and even fewer that are based on “stable”.
I don’t think any distro based on Debian can be rolling because Debian isn’t rolling. Sometimes you can roll through a major Debian upgrade but sometimes, perhaps most times, you cannot.
If you aren’t comfortable with the command line, you might want to check out our sister distro MX Linux. But like antiX, it’s based on Debian and does not roll.
It’s much more GUI-centric than antiX. The cool thing about MX is it’s based on Debian stable but they have a large “community repo” where they add and backport newer packages. One of the forums is dedicated to requests for new packages and new backports.
If you really want a rolling release then I suggest you look at Manjaro Linux. Also, here is a recent list of 10 Rolling release distros.
Good luck in your search! IMO if you really want a rolling distro then you should be able to handle the transition from using something Debian based. Another idea would be to make an account on the MX forums and ask them about easing the pain of a major upgrade when you have to do a re-install. This may help you make a more informed decision.
Context is worth 80 IQ points -- Alan Kay
☉☉ lookit, found some more “alternative facts”
_
^— antiX is listed among the DW search results
and
Zeiss Ikon
If you aren’t comfortable with the command line, you might want to check out our sister distro MX Linux.
<clip>
If you really want a rolling release then I suggest you look at Manjaro Linux. Also, here is a recent list of 10 Rolling release distros.
Good luck in your search! IMO if you really want a rolling distro then you should be able to handle the transition from using something Debian based. Another idea would be to make an account on the MX forums and ask them about easing the pain of a major upgrade when you have to do a re-install. This may help you make a more informed decision.
Well, there’s comfort, and there’s comfort. I used DOS for three years before Windows came out, as well as very slight exposure to Unix (on a Tandy Model 12 remote system). I’m fine with typing commands. I’m not fine with spending hundreds of hours reading man pages that weren’t written to be readable, trying to learn enough commands well enough to get anything useful done at the command line without just copying and pasting — I got that comfortable with DOS 3.31 in the late ’80s, but I’m thirty-some years older now…
I’ll drop in over at the MX forum and see if they give me anything more useful than “embrace the clean install.” I’m very sorry, but that isn’t going to happen — I’ll never have a high level of enjoyment doing things where a pretty minor mistake can result in erasing tens of gigabytes of stuff I intended to keep, and have hundreds of hours of work in. This isn’t a hobby machine — this is my “production” system.
over at the MX forum
a few relevant search keywords for the MX forum search:
“migrate” (er, migration) and “aptik”BobC
Rolling is dangerous by definition.
antiX being “released” is good because it means the major components are tested. New and updated packages get added over time. That’s “new” enough for me. Every once in a while I NEED a never version of something, and then I experiment, trying things on a spare system, but I *KNOW* when and what I’m experimenting with.
For my main system I don’t want a real “rolling” model where BECAUSE its the bleeding edge I end up with everything trashed once every year or two. That’s fine for playing, but not a production system, IMO.
Just my opinion. I’ve been cut too many times and know better than to believe a real rolling system is going to also be safe.
excellent followup here:
topic: Should I switch to MX?
fungalnet
I don’t understand how can you not be rolling? Daily there are security fixes somewhere along the tree in debian and the more serious they are the faster they travel down the hierarchy. Small bug fixes on software don’t travel as quickly. But whether you run sid, testing, stable, old-testing, you get daily upgrades. Even wheezy Deb7 stopped getting upgrades a year or two ago? As far as security goes if you don’t upgrade/roll you may be opening up your system with security holes that progressively become widely known and exploited.
If Arch is 3-6 months on the average ahead of debian sid, and unlike what most people think and hear as rumors and myths, things are pretty stable and not breaking, to call Debian sid bleeding, when arch calls itself cutting/not bleeding, is a bit of an offense to the intelligence of the decision makers. How can the same packages work with each other in arch (or even arch-testing – the true definition of bleeding) and some months later they break on sid? Packaging and configuring upstream packages to meet distro policy is not that hard to apply, and it is not as much of a risk.
Gtk4 is out and Qt6 is out as stable. Few applications are written for them but developers can and will start testing their stuff to move up the trend. It will probably take 2-3 years before the first application fully utilizing them will end up in Debian stable.
I think this mythology of stability is a bit exaggerated. We, users, break the systems, they rarely break on their own.
On a separate note, with very old hardware, “upgrading” may be a disaster if the kernel being upgraded to has dropped support for your rare strange video card. You reboot to a black screen and if you have an sshd running you may be able to revert to an older one. If not you must boot from another disk and try to recover. Still, not the system’s fault, but yours because you didn’t read all the release information that came with the upgrade.
anti-X - Adélie - obarun - systemd Free Space
My second Linux system was a “rolling” one. It was super difficult to install, painstakingly, one line at a time. It took a week to get it installed and running. I was mostly a Mainframe and Windows person and I hadn’t looked at Linux in 7 or 8 years at the time. I was proud that I was able to run Arch. Each day I updated it and it ran, and I learned more and improved things as I went. One day a couple weeks later ran the update command (pacman with parms), and the machine crashed and wouldn’t boot.
I was lost and the board where I was asking questions was very unfriendly (RTFM), and so I just cut my losses, and went and tried other distros. I had lost about a month’s effort and decided it wasn’t worth even the effort to restore from a backup I’d made the week before, because if it fell apart that easily, I would be getting lots of practice recovering from crashes, and getting little else accomplished.
Yes, a stable 3 yr old system, where you can only do things people “used” to do is also not good, but there is a happy place somewhere between, and that’s where antiX is.
Brian Masinick
If the Debian security repo is included you can get security updates.
I suppose that in a practical way there are perpetual updates, though this alone isn’t usually associated with the “rolling release” model.
A Debian Testing or Sid configuration or a typical Arch Linux setup has much more frequent application updates and would be similar to the capability of a rolling release.
Endeavor OS, an Arch Linux derivative, is an example of a system that offers similar abilities.
I have not used a straight Arch Linux setup for several years. Sabayon Linux, Endeavor OS and Debian Sid have been the most recent distributions I have been using with a packaging system that can be used for long periods of time, but apparently do not meet the true definition of a ‘rolling release’.
Actually I also have openSUSE Tumbleweed and it has been working well and it also allows for regular package updates.
Given the correct definition of a ‘rolling release’ compare it and evaluate whether these or others meet your actual needs, then decide if it’s actually the rolling release that you need or the ability to update the software and/or upgrade the system.
- This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by Brian Masinick.
- This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by Brian Masinick.
- This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by Brian Masinick.
--
Brian MasinickI would guess it’s controlled by whoever is managing the repos. I tried Sabayon at some point around 2006 and couldn’t get my triple video card/6 display system to work with it, but it was a good system, and the people there were friendly. It worked fine on a simpler setup. That was the problem Debian solved for me that the others didn’t. I think it was really an nVidia/Xorg/Java setup problem, not really a distro problem. I liked Sabayon.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
