- This topic has 25 replies, 11 voices, and was last updated Dec 27-10:01 pm by BobC.
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Brian Masinick
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.
Most Debian configurations either come with, or make available a “security” repository. If you are using Sid, chances are the separate security repo may be redundant, provided the security changes come through.
Regarding “rolling”, I have interpreted that to mean that the overall packaging system and the available applications are updated as changes become available. With the exception of a security fix, that is definitely not the case with Debian Stable; the intent of Stable is to maintain stable software for a couple of years, or in the case of server environments, even longer, making changes only to resolve security issues.
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.
I do not think that any software released by an application team is “bleeding” or “unstable”. With regard to Debian, what can be somewhat “unstable” is not the set of applications, it is the potential application dependency resolution that is not 100% tested for the many architectures that Debian supports. I’ve used Debian Sid installations for years at a time, between 5-10 years, simply updating packages as they change. The software is NOT unstable and neither are the packages. Truthfully the number of serious issues on Intel and AMD hardware is quite small; I usually do not even notice most of them because they are quickly resolved.
I had a few problems with Arch Linux in the past. To be fair, I had one or two problems and though they were serious, they were actually caused by a few bad community packages in the “AUR” packages, and these issues happened more than a decade ago. I’ve used Endeavor OS recently and I have seen ZERO issues.
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Brian Masinick
userzero
I can’t remember how many years I’ve been with ArchLinux without reinstalling, that’s good, 🙂
Openbox + tint2 + x-apps + dunst + polybar + onlyoffice + planner + quilter + todo peque.- This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by userzero.
andyprough
OP should try PCLinuxOS – rolling, stable, and uses Debian’s apt package manager.
BobC
I haven’t looked in detail recently, and PCLinuxOS is a good environment (I ran it for a few months a couple years ago), but my experience tells me to question that the word “rolling” means for sure that the rolling OS is automatically more up to date than one not specifically rolling. I would think it is dependent on the speed of packaging and testing and move to repo operations.
Maybe we should look before we take that as a “truth”. I would suggest looking at the versions of a few packages we all use that need to be up to date, like the kernels, browser, office, and window manager. Myself I don’t update all kernels or office, but I do update the browser and window manager, and I know that the office system is kept very up to date.
And updating these things on antiX takes little effort and no command line operations on the users part, if that matters.
Ok, so I installed the newest PCLinuxOS KDE version and updated it, manually updated Firefox and IceWM and compared the versions to antiX. The results were very close. antiX is based on Debian stable, but the current packages are all much newer. One newer than PCLinuxOS, which was surprising. Anyway, so it demonstrates that Rolling is not by definition newer than Release. I suspect that the newer LibrOffice on antiX is as a result of antiX supporting setups at a school, and anti himself has made sure the programs are up to date for them. Again, PCLinuxOS is a good OS and the people there are nice and supportive, so please don’t read into my words any negative comment about it from me.
PS: all updating on both was done from gui’s, no command line effort on either.
antiX:
IceWM – 2.0
LibreOffice – 7.04
Firefox – 84.0.1PCLinuxOS
IceWM – 2.0
LibreOffice – 7.02
Firefox – 84.0.1- This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by BobC.
manyroads
There are all sorts of assumptions that when tested may not prove true…. I use dwm because I like it and have tweaked it to my ‘fancy’. I can run gnome, xfce, lxqt all in about the same memory space. I just don’t like them as much. duh….
Pax vobiscum,
Mark Rabideau - http://many-roads.com
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." H. L. Mencken
dwm & i3wm ~Reg. Linux User #449130
20 Jan 2021 ~ "End of an Error"I just realized that it all boils down to:
Do you want to risk some breakage every day or week as individual packages get updated, or for major changes wait till more testing is done?
Do you backup often? And how good are you at recovering?
My guess is Manyroads ENJOYS the challenge of new things 🙂 Challenge to mastery, mastery to challenge…
ModdIt
Late here, personal preference is antiX over the previously used rolling release. Having no major issues for over a year,
latest versions of the software needed for kids and students as well as for photo and video editing, watching youtube videos,
etc. has proved the wisdom of the model. Being able to make use of old hardware a boon, especialy now as many parents have lost
most or even all income due pandemic. On newer hardware antiX is a bit tricky but once running lightning fast.
There is a lot of gratitude to both anticapitalista as well as all those who have helped to make a transition easier for new
users. How many, I wish I knew, having been used to getting help calls near daily the silent phone caused/poses some worry.
The feedback I do get, is once installed and over pain points antiX is a comfort zone, it gets work done without getting in the way.
Big contrast to a redmond product which may decide to update for hours when you need to write an essay, or as recently happened
to some students delete user files while updating.
The antiX tools make backups, experiments and resulting failures pretty much painless, good for learning how the system works.
As long as users are not too careless that is :-).Brian Masinick
There are all sorts of assumptions that when tested may not prove true…. I use dwm because I like it and have tweaked it to my ‘fancy’. I can run gnome, xfce, lxqt all in about the same memory space. I just don’t like them as much. duh….
Personal preferences are really the primary concern. I have used all kinds of “stable” and “unstable” systems. I’ve only experienced a couple of “catastrophic” failures in over 25 years of using Linux software and over 40 years of using a variety of free and commercial operating systems. In the so-called “catastrophic” instances, I had backup software. We’ve mentioned that countless times too. Even if things totally break – which is not very likely – it is still possible to restore a system from another reliable copy. If you have more than one physical system, the risks are even smaller, very close to zero.
Simply stated, back up your work, verify your backups occasionally, and just in case, keep a spare USB device or DVD handy, and you’ll always have multiple ways to recover.
Repeating this, even with the remote possibility of failure, complete recovery and minimal loss of time and data is possible and practical.- This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by Brian Masinick.
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Brian Masinickex_Koo
I like manyroads make the system my own have no interest in GUI desktops, been using i3wm-gaps which has always been installed from the github, never had one problem with it in over 3 years. Run a pretty simply system main use’s internet, music, scripts, will even install from source code. But would like to learn how to make deb files from source code.
And learn lots from the people here and all over the internet, don’t always have wins the first time round like with mpd latest version but I will come back to this when I get home been away for quite some now. And I see that ncmpcpp have once again start updating their player which I have installed from source and still working on setting it up my way and learning the new configuration.That what makes Linux and antiX so great and fun to use, its free and yours.
I have learned after installing and setting up antiX to make a snapshot (it should be called heaven) and have lots backups too.
Happy New Year to All
Koo, I think the thread’s Op has been doing the same kind of thing where he makes the distro his own, and then new things get added, which he wants, but don’t work with the release he worked with, and he finds out that upgrading it to the next release is the best way to get those new features, but it’s huge work to get there.
I’ve had it happen to me a bunch of times, too, with many OS’s and Linux distros, and each time I was spending a week or two getting migrated to the new release. That was why I created the packagecomp, because it turned that week into an evening’s work, and has been reliable at doing it without causing many problems. I need to make my changes within constraints to make that an easy thing to do, but the constraints are very livable.
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