Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

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If you're running desktop Linux, you will have a better experience with a rolling release than being stuck with whatever state the software that was frozen in Debian/Ubuntu is in, especially when it comes to multimedia, graphics, screen sharing, etc.

Modern desktop Linux relies on software that's being fixed and improving at a high velocity, and ironically, can be more stable than relying on a distro's fixed release cycles.

KDE Plasma, Wayland support, Pipewire, etc all have had recent fixes and improvements that you will not get to enjoy for another X months/years until Canonical pulls in those changes and freezes them for release.

Similarly, newer kernels are a must when using relatively recent hardware. Fixes and support for new hardware lands in new kernels, LTS releases might not have the best support for your newer hardware.

> can be more stable than relying on a distro's fixed release cycles

Stability for a distro means “doesn’t change” not “doesn’t crash”.

Debian/ubuntu are stable because they freeze versions so you can even create scripts to work around bugs and stuff and be sure that it will keep working throughout that entire release.

Arch Linux is not stable because you get updates every day or whatever. Maybe you had some script or patch to work around a bug and tomorrow it won’t work anymore.

This does not say _anything_ about crashing or bugs, except that if you find a bug/crash on a stable system then it is likely you can rely on this behaviour.

Agree. If you use a rolling release you definitely need a strategy for stability. I turn off automatic updates and schedule planned full updates that I can easily roll back from. I've had two breakages over the years that required snapper rollback. (Rolling back from a major distro upgrade isn't that easy)

It's a tradeoff that I'm happy with. I get to have a very up to date system.

> you will have a better experience with a rolling release than being stuck with whatever state the software that was frozen in Debian/Ubuntu is in

That's a wild statement!

That’s interesting comment. I didn’t think about that. I’ve only ever used Ubuntu flavours so I’ll search through what the popular rolling releases are out of interest.

I just upgrade Ubuntu every 6 months. To me that's a pretty good compromise between up to date packages and stability.

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