[bow_]

My own view: rolling release distros gets less in my way than distros like Debian. They allow me to install anything I want, as close as possible to upstream.

Not saying one is better than the other, just remarking that it's interesting to see 'getting in the way' meaning completely opposite things for different people :).

[gsliepen]

But... Debian is also a rolling release distro. Just use the "testing" or "unstable" suite. I am using Debian unstable on my main desktop since 1999, and had very little issues with it. The testing suite is the one which filters out most bugs found in unstable, and is something you can definitely use as a regular user.

[andersa]

Can confirm, have been using Debian testing branch on my local server for AI experiments for a year and it works great. Never hit any major issues, always have (reasonably) up to date software.

[bow_]

Right ~ fair enough. I should have clarified I meant Debian stable (and by extension all other non-rolling release distros).

[AlecSchueler]

I've found both to be true at different times in my life. When I was younger and had time to read release notes I found rolling release made my life a lot easier, because my software was always close to the documentation online, always had the latest fixes etc.

But now my schedule only lets me do an update once a month rather than daily, so it feels more likely to introduce breaking changes and I'd rather just leave her all until a specific moment when I have the time to work through it all, and the longer term support distris help with that because those big all-at-once upgrades seem to be better documented.

Different strokes and all that

[zozbot234]

> My own view: rolling release distros gets less in my way than distros like Debian. They allow me to install anything I want, as close as possible to upstream.

Debian comes with backports repositories which allow you to cleanly install newer versions of selected packages, without affecting the rest of the system.