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Comment by bsg75 | Hacker News Reader

Running `dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=32` [1] now on a dev box, which leads me to a question:

In trying rolling releases, namely Arch and the Manjaro derivative, I seem to have more upgrade version conflicts than I do with regular Fedora `dnf upgrade` and the bi-annual system upgrade.

The Arch conflicts are often resolved by waiting a few days for the community fixes to the broken upgrade paths, because I don't use anything too rare.

But given the relative popularity of the Arch approach, and the frequency of people who state anecdotally "I have never borked a system with pacman", but I seem to have the opposite experience, what are the real advantages to a rolling release compared to the Fedora approach?

[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf-system-u...

https://fedoramagazine.org/upgrading-fedora-31-to-fedora-32/

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I like that things might break two times a year, when I can prepare and set aside time for it, instead of randomly. I also like not having to check a website for any issues like one does with arch.

Fedora is now a hybrid, some packages that are security sensitive are rolling, like kernel, web browsers, etc. And the ones that don’t need updates all the time are updated at releases. So it is the best of both worlds, things that matter are always updated while keeping overall system stability

> In trying rolling releases, namely Arch and the Manjaro derivative, I seem to have more upgrade version conflicts than I do with regular Fedora `dnf upgrade` and the bi-annual system upgrade.

It's possible I just happen to not be using the broken packages, but I've been using Arch as my daily driver for about six years now, and I've run into package conflicts when upgrading maybe once or twice. For me, having a package conflict once every three years or so (which as you say is generally resolved within a couple days) is worth immediately getting upgrades for everything on my system rather than having to wait for a new release of the OS itself. I also prefer not having the default desktop environment tied to the distro I'm using; although I do use Gnome, every distro I've tried out that has it pre-installed comes with a lot of extra stuff that I don't want installed, and even after removing it, some systems will reinstall most of it on OS upgrades. I completely understand the appeal of a distro that has explicit releases and comes working out-of-the-box, but it's just not something I want.

Interesting to hear, because I used to hear the opposite: things like Nvidia drivers taking a month or two to be available in a new release. That has changed in Fedora?

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