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Comment by billfruit | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn't Ubuntu (and many other distributions) change to a rolling release model. Having switched to Arch, though admittedly the installation process is much more elaborate than of Ubuntu, once you customise it to one's preference, it is much more convenient to keep upgrading individual packages as they are evolving.

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Last time I tried Arch (about a decade ago), I gave a command to update packages. In the update, my NVIDIA card was moved to be supported by "nvidia-legacy" rather than "nvidia"... Of course, I didn't have legacy drivers installed, so the driver failed pretty badly (it was assigned to NVIDIA in my xorg conf). X wouldn't load, and because several aspects of X changed in the update, I had to spend a few hours figuring out what when wrong.

The point of the above (possibly out of date) story is that when I say "update", I want a minimal chance that something serious changed. I don't mind fiddling around with Linux, but I want it to be on my terms (like a lazy Sunday). Giving the user a choice between "update" and "upgrade" allows me to specify when I want to apply major changes.

Couldn't they do a "freeze" with backports just for the LTS? My experience with non LTS versions were always awful so I don't see why a rolling release model would be that much worse.

Rolling releases break more. If you get to far away from the current version, good luck updating.

nvidia's binary blobs cause headaches on all distros -

this isn't really a distro/linux issue.

The point is that this should be an "upgrade" change vs. an "update" change.

Rolling releases only have the later concept, meaning that instead of the user acknowledging and preparing for a change, users need to respond to it.

It kind of is, since Linux is the one insisting on being actively hostile drivers that aren't part of the kernel source tree.

Because rolling releases give you a terrible choice between constant upgrades all the time (read: resource and network usage and reboots), and if you don't, a high likelihood of something breaking when you finally do that pacman -Syu.

There's nothing wrong with snapshot releases in a distro focused on usability and stability.

pacman -Syu was always a dangerous ride in the past, but the last two years it hasn't broken anything for me, ever.

I upgrade all packages about once a week.

Once a week is insane.

I have 4 computers and 2 phones. No time for that.

My mother update her distro twice a year, when I come over and think about it.

Isn't your number of computers insane? The right number of computers for most people is exactly one.

A notebook is not a gaming desktop is not a server.

My girlfriends has 3 (2 laptops, one tablet) and one phone, and she isn't even a geek.

But let's be real, people installing arch don't have "one computer". Not the ones around me anyway.

I'd like to disprove that statement with myself as a counterexample. One laptop exactly, and also PS3+4 but I don't think that counts as "computer" in this context.

Yes, sometimes it would be nice to have another machine or a monitor around. Or a desk that's not a dining table, even. Oh well! Anyway, Arch works just great for this kind of use case.

I have 5 computers (1 notebook, 1 desktop, 3 servers) on Arch, and I update daily. The twist is that I have a cronjob that downloads all the packages in the background, then pings me via XMPP and asks for confirmation to install the updates, and if that succeeds, asks if I want to restart any services or reboot the machine (in case of kernel upgrade). That whole thing takes me about 1 minute per day.

> I have a cronjob that downloads all the packages in the background, then pings me via XMPP

Yeah, you lost me there. Too much customization for me. Which is why I use Ubuntu.

You see the point is not that Arch or Ubuntu is better, but that it really targets very different user bases.

Time for what? Just use automation.

If you read the other comments, you'll note that it's exactly what we are talking about: we install ubuntu because we don't want to do stuff, we want the OS to mostly work out of the box and require the least setup possible.

I generally prefer LTS-style releases for machines that I'm setting up for other people who I don't expect to do their own maintenance. That way, I'm less nervous about setting up automatic updates (since an update is less likely to break things). I also generally prefer LTS-style releases for business/enterprise use, since the release schedule is more predictable.

For my own use (or for power users and other tech-savvy folks who I'm reasonably sure will be able to maintain their systems themselves), a rolling release is less worrying.

When I used Arch some years ago, I regularly updated the system, but that meant things broke reguarly. Not updating regularly is not an option. Sure, there was always an easy fix, but that's not the experience most of us are after.

The bigger problem with the rolling release model was that package maintainers would leave packages sit for long periods of time, and then they'd write long, arrogant posts in the forum telling users that it's no big deal to compile your software. That can't happen with a regular release schedule.

Because servers.

For a while I used a distro called Chakra[0] that had a neat semi-rolling release model[1]. It seemed like a nice compromise. The system was stable, but end user apps were up to date.

[0] - https://www.chakralinux.org [1] - https://wiki.chakralinux.org/index.php?title=Half-Rolling_Re...

> Arch, though admittedly the installation process is much more elaborate than of Ubuntu

If you want easier-to-install-Arch and a bit more cautious/safer rolling release cycles, take a look at Manjaro.

With antergos you can use nice graphic installer to install arch.

Same with Manjaro. I've been happily using the i3 distribution for like 6 months now. And I only have minor complains.

It should be noted that i3wm installs and runs easily on distros such as Ubuntu and Fedora too - which is how I was introduced to it (after liking the tiling aspects from Unity, but not the graphics card/RAM hit that came with it).

The i3 edition of Manjaro is heavily customised and almost an entirely different beast (i3-gaps etc).

This is the piece that swung me: https://adereth.github.io/blog/2013/10/02/why-you-should-try...

It mentions notion so I tried that for about 2 days before taking up a comment's suggestion to try i3.

Edit: I don't think there's an official guide for actually installing i3, but the official fedora blog has a good one. Searching for "install i3wm ubuntu" (or arch) would likely also show some good default setups.

>though admittedly the installation process is much more elaborate than of Ubuntu

The only thing that's more difficult about the Arch install is that you have to be able to follow written instructions...

I'm an Arch user, and I absolutely disagree. Installing Ubuntu requires no knowledge of how a terminal works, what hard disks are and why they are partitioned, how DHCP works, etc. etc.

... and have a couple spare weeks if you're inexperienced with Arch and don't have an intimate knowledge of the entire Linux user space stack. Sure, if you're experienced with Arch it might appear to be just some written instructions; otherwise, it's more like 1,000 page text book on Linux.

For the record, Arch Linux has to have the best, thorough documentation I've ever read.

I personally prefer Slackware's as far as "official" or "semi-official" documentation goes, but I refer to the Arch wiki pretty frequently even though I haven't used Arch at all in the last 5 years.

OpenBSD's manpages are also remarkably comprehensive, and they're available without an Internet connection. Pretty fantastic if you're using OpenBSD for your gateway and fucked up your PF configuration :)

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