Rolling vs Stable

I've been using CentOS for several years. The down side (for me) is having to reload the OS every 3 or 4 years. I've only recently tried a rolling release, Manjaro. I've been using it for about a year. I haven't had any major issues. It has had a few flaky moments, but all in all not too shabby. I will say that flipping back and forth between different distros on a daily basis can be a bit flustering at times remembering subtle nuances between them. ;) But... I wouldn't have it any other way. :D
 


It seems from time to time, people ask "What's the best distro?". And I like the answer usually given here.The best distro is the one that works for you. There are some distro's that don't work on some hardware I've had in the past.

But consider the following. A 3 year old might ride a tricycle. A five year old might ride a bicycle with training wheels. A 10 year old might be doing tricks, flips and jumps on a custom bike. A 16 year old might move up to a 26 inch frame and a 10-speed. An Olympic racer might have a custom carbon-fiber bike that costs over $300,000.

The point here is... sometimes it depends on your maturity. Not how old you are really, but rather, how much experience you have with Linux, operating systems, and computers in general.

For newbies, an easy to install, easy to use distro is often best. Good documentation is always a plus. For guys that have been doing this 10 years or more, they can use whatever distro they like. I think sometimes, those of us who have been doing this a long time, forget what it was like to start from scratch and learn something new from the start. For us "experienced guys", a lot of it has to do with familiarity. What we're used to. What we started out with.

Another thing that often determines what distro people use, is stability vs new features. It used to be that Linux in general was a long ways behind Windows when it came to new hardware, new CPUs, and new chipsets. Not so much anymore. In fact it does happen sometimes that Linux has it before Windows does.

I named this thread "rolling vs stability" and I haven't even gotten to that point yet. But what does that mean. For the most it means "thoroughly tested" vs "not very well tested yet". For example. Red-hat is notorious for testing everything about 2 years before they release it. Their systems are pretty stable, but the downside is... they are a couple of years behind the curve in new features and drivers.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Arch. Generally they are one of the first distro's to come out with the latest kernels and drivers. The term in Linux circles is "bleeding edge". ( A play on leading edge, because sometimes it's painful ).

It seems everyone else is somewhere in the middle, Fedora for example is usually a month or two behind Arch. It's more tested than the current Arch release, but it's still pretty new stuff.

Ubuntu does things a little differently, they have some releases that are considered "long term stable". But other also has other releases that are a little newer, but not considered quite as stable, and do not have support for an extended period of time.

Debian seem to be closer to the back of the pack. Many consider it to be more stable than other distros, but again it's typically a year or two behind the leading edge curve.

I don't know if there's a website that breaks down all the distro's by how far behind the "latest and greatest" stuff everyone is, but it would be interesting to see. It definitely has a lot to do, with which distro's people choose.

=========== Back on the soapbox for a moment ==========
I have to mention Kali here. It's a good distro, I've used it from time to time. I don't currently have a Kali installed anywhere. But back to my example about some kids still riding tricycles, if you don't know what a kernel trace is, what a packet capture is, if you don't have some familiarity with the OSI network stack, .. maybe this isn't the best distro for you to start off with. The screens look cool, and everyone wants to be a "hacker". (You can get just about all the tools that come with Kali in other distros) and I know, you're smarter than all those other guys who came before you... right? Trust me, just about everyone learns the hard way, you'll switch distro's before you get it all figured out.
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Learning to use Linux is like driving a car. Very few of us "old timers" have the same car we learned to drive on. I've had about 15 vehicles since then. I think very few of us are using the same distro we started out on.
Isn't Nitrux the best Linux distro for beginners?
 
In my experience, rolling release distros are not that unstable. I've been using EndeavourOS and Arch for one year now and I've never went through any of the problems that some people claim to be really common while using more Bleeding-Edge distros. They work fine overall. I also have some friends who are like super epic power users who've been using arch for years and as far as I know none of them had a single arch linux installation broken.
What are the major issues with EndeavourOS?
 
Isn't Nitrux the best Linux distro for beginners?
Personal opinion, NO. too basic for most Windows users who want a full out of the box distribution
 
Isn't Nitrux the best Linux distro for beginners?
Niturx SUCKS. There is no reason why somebody, ESPECIALLY A BEGINNER, should start with such a distro. Its so unstable, it doesnt even work properly and the installer is broken
 
What are the major issues with EndeavourOS?
The only issue? On some PCs the live ISO doesnt boot for some reasons. Just a few PCs, especially prebuilts and ASRock Mobos. There are no more major issues
 
Its funny how we're talking about Nitrux when I was actually on the verge of running it in a VM to test it out, and possibly ditch Mint for it. Because I don't have any experience with it like the rest of you do, I'll take what you've said about it into consideration. I am curious to know if the Nitrux team has responded to the criticisms and fixed them.
 
Its funny how we're talking about Nitrux when I was actually on the verge of running it in a VM to test it out, and possibly ditch Mint for it. Because I don't have any experience with it like the rest of you do, I'll take what you've said about it into consideration. I am curious to know if the Nitrux team has responded to the criticisms and fixed them.
Based on what I've read, it doesn't look like just another spin, and the devs actually made some uncommon decisions. Apparently they're using Openrc for init, and some KDE overlay, and I don't know what else. So it could be an interesting venture. I won't be using it, because they appear to be based on Debian Unstable, and I'm just not interested in crashing every two days.
 
Based on what I've read, it doesn't look like just another spin, and the devs actually made some uncommon decisions. Apparently they're using Openrc for init, and some KDE overlay, and I don't know what else. So it could be an interesting venture. I won't be using it, because they appear to be based on Debian Unstable, and I'm just not interested in crashing every two days.

I've read up on that as well, but that doesn't answer my question about the devs responding to criticisms
 
I wonder if a lot of Linux users know the relationship with the downstream vendors?


For example, certain Fedora releases eventually become Redhat.. which eventually becomes.. CentOS, Alma, Rocky, Oracle, etc...
Note the vendor supported versions are typically a year or two behind the upstream releases.

I have less experience with Ubuntu, but I've heard it's much the same way...
I'm told certain releases of Ubuntu/Mint eventually become Debian.

Certain releases of OpenSuSE eventually become SuSE-SLES.

It's possible other Linux's do this as well, I'm just not aware of them.
 
@dos2unix If we go back to 1991/2 there were about 16 parental distributions, since then some have fallen by the wayside, others have become parent and grandparents to other distributions Red Hat was a parent distribution one of its children [Fedora came around sometime in 2001/2]. SUSE is the child of Slackware, [which in turn started life as MCC Linux], Peppermint started out as a child of Mint who in turn was a child of Ubuntu which was developed in the early 2000's from Debian, so basically all the 500 or so desktop Linux owe their linage to one of about 16 original distributions
 
In the Ubuntu realm, certain releases are then LTS releases - with extended support available for up to 10 years. Those are every other year and always the April release. So, 20.04 and 22.04 and eventually 24.04.

All the other releases are 'interim' releases. You might then conclude that the LTS is the primary product goal and that the others lead up to that.
 
I won't be using it, because they appear to be based on Debian Unstable, and I'm just not interested in crashing every two days.
There's a misconception here that "unstable" means that the operating system will "fall over" or "crash", as the term "unstable" might be interpreted metaphorically. In fact the term "unstable" in debian simply refers to the fact that packages of that version of the distribution change fairly rapidly as the developers add upgraded and new packages. It's the package list, if you like, that is unstable which is quite a different sense of the term in this context. In fact the unstable branch of debian is used by many users as their daily drivers without any sort of the "instability" that is meant by falling over, crashing or fragmenting. That's not to say there aren't issues from time to time that need attention for that version of debian to run smoothly. The debian developers actually take great care with what they add into the unstable branch by following protocols and processes which actually keeps the "falling over" to low levels, and is mostly absent altogether. Naturally, because of the greater risk of unforeseen problems in this branch, it's not recommended for situations where lesser risk problem-free operation is preferred such as servers.

The debian code name for the unstable branch is "Sid" which is derived from a character in Toy Story who smashes things up, which probably doesn't help with the image of what the branch is, but generally "Sid" stands for "Still In Development" which is a much more accurate characterisation of the branch.
 
The debian code name for the unstable branch is "Sid" which is derived from a character in Toy Story who smashes things up, which probably doesn't help with the image of what the branch is,

I totally agree with everything you say here, but I wonder if it was a bad choice in naming.
Instead of "unstable". Maybe something like "not as thoroughly tested" or at least "unknown stability".
Unstable makes it sound like... I know for a fact that this isn't very good.
 
It is called unstable because unlike "stable" it is constantly getting updates.
Some days I might only have a couple of packages update, other days I get 50 or more packages that update.
Two apps that are a must when using "unstable"; apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges.
Those two will save you from totally screwing up your system.
I ran Sid on an old Thinkpad for a bit over ten yrs, never had it completely break.
 
I totally agree with everything you say here, but I wonder if it was a bad choice in naming.

We suck at naming things. The people who don't know the definitions will make up all sorts of crap.

I'll give you three examples from science...

The God Particle: No, finding it doesn't mean a deity exists, it mean more particle types probably exist.

Dark Matter: That's just a catch-all phrase. Whatever it is that is giving galaxies extra mass - that's dark matter. Whatever explains that, is dark matter.

Dark Energy: This is one of the worst. But, like dark matter, it's just a placeholder for whatever it is that explains why the universe is expanding at an increasing rate of speed when our current understanding insists it should be doing the opposite.

People who don't understand science have latched onto those phrases and tried to do things like discount science entirely. These are the sorts of people who think the earth is flat and that we never went to the moon.

And, yeah, those descriptions are really all they mean. They're just place holder names to explain an observed state. They don't mean the science is wrong, they just mean our understanding is not complete. But, if science was complete, we'd stop doing science!

Whatever it is that means galaxies have more mass than expected? That's 'dark matter'. No matter what it is, that's what 'dark matter' is referring to. It doesn't mean "hur dur gravity is just a theory!!!", it means our understanding is incomplete.

So... Yeah... We suck at naming stuff. Some folks, probably deliberately, use this sort of stuff to mislead the mentally ill, desperate, and poorly educated. Dark matter isn't meant to be understood by you or me, it's like using the word 'distro' to mean something in the Linux community - and gibberish elsewhere.
 
Isn't Nitrux the best Linux distro for beginners?
Nitrux can't be recommended to a noob, specially because it uses OpenRC as the init system and not SystemD. Considering the majority of Desktop GNU/Linux users use SystemD which has documentation far better than what OpenRC has, a beginner might face a hard time if one wants to try out a non-systemD distro.
 
a beginner might face a hard time if one wants to try out a non-systemD distro.

Yup. For better or worse, the content out there today is largely systemd based.

On my own site, I don't even bother mentioning the difference (most of the time), because I aim to write for the majority, especially the newbies who are among the majority.

Good call!
 
Well, I'm using Ubuntu Distribution to study, I think there is a merit is that the
 
I got my first linux os by the age of 12 for christmas, it was redhat linux, after about 2 months of that i switched to arch, and then about a year after that i switched over to gentoo and havent looked back yet. i try out some of the new distros via virtualbox every now and then to see how they have progressed.
 

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