A Rolling-Release Version Of Fedora Is Discussed

[Ansla]

That describes all rolling-release distros. I'm not just saying that as a hater, I grew up on Gentoo and currently use Arch.

It's not like non-rolling distributions don't cause breakage, it's just that they cause all the damage every six months, or maybe at larger time intervals if you decide to skip a release or use LTS.
I used Redhat (before it split into Fedora and RHEL), Fedora, Suse/Opensuse, Kubuntu before finally settling with Gentoo and all of them broke heavily when updating to a new version.
With Gentoo I do get some breakage from time to time but at smaller scale and it's also easier to identify the package that caused it then when upgrading all the packages in a classic dist-upgrade.

[ruel24]

I'm a long-time user of PCLinuxOS. It's a rolling release. Yes, it doesn't work perfect, but it works close enough. Upgrading every 6 months is a pain, and even that's not a guarantee you'll have a stable system. Unlike openSuse Tumbleweed, if Fedora wants to do the rolling release right, it needs to support DKMS. I'm not a user of Fedora, so it might already and I don't know it, but this is important. At openSuse, when the kernel upgrades, you need to invoke a console command to rebuild the module for nVidia. With DKMS, this is all done for you. I cannot believe a distro puts out a rolling release without supporting DKMS out of the bag.

Mageia gave the same speech as Fedora with the subject of rolling releases came up. They said their Cauldron development release would work for those wanting a rolling release. What some of these people lost in the stone age of Linux distros done't seem to get is that reinstalling every 6 months is not what most users want. They want to set it and forget it. Users want the latest KDE, Gnome, etc. without waiting for the next release.

In my experience, rolling releases are rock solid - more-so than the big release every 6 months. I used to pray I'd have no problems with the new release when I used Ubuntu. Then, there was the time I had to spend resetting my desktop up, adding all my favorite apps back in... Now, I occasionally wipe and reinstall, but mostly just use the system. I just did the first reinstall in over a year and a half. Seems to work great for me.

[RahulSundaram]

I'm a long-time user of PCLinuxOS. It's a rolling release. Yes, it doesn't work perfect, but it works close enough. Upgrading every 6 months is a pain, and even that's not a guarantee you'll have a stable system. Unlike openSuse Tumbleweed, if Fedora wants to do the rolling release right, it needs to support DKMS. I'm not a user of Fedora, so it might already and I don't know it, but this is important. At openSuse, when the kernel upgrades, you need to invoke a console command to rebuild the module for nVidia. With DKMS, this is all done for you. I cannot believe a distro puts out a rolling release without supporting DKMS out of the bag.

Mageia gave the same speech as Fedora with the subject of rolling releases came up. They said their Cauldron development release would work for those wanting a rolling release. What some of these people lost in the stone age of Linux distros done't seem to get is that reinstalling every 6 months is not what most users want. .

There is no need to reinstall every six months or even every one year. Just because there is a new release doesn't mean you need to reinstall and besides why would you reinstall instead of upgrading? Most users don't want major changes rapidly in updates either (moving from KDE 3 to 4 or GNOME 2 to 3 should be planned) . The fact of the matter is that, the people who want rolling releases are tech savvy users and they can very well use a development branch constantly as I do for Fedora. Other users can stick to a release supported for a long time such as RHEL or rebuilds which work fine for regular desktop users really. DKMS is well supported in Fedora although Fedora users would be more used to akmods for kernel drivers which integrates with Fedora kernels in a better way

http://fedorasolved.org/Members/zcat/akmods

I don't mind a rolling relases method for Fedora but it is silly to imagine this is going to ever go mainstream.

[drag]

Debian SID + aptlist-bugs is like a rolling release, not so update in some packages or slower to deliver some last versions of other packages, but it's good and stable.

It's not 'like' a rolling release. It _is_ a rolling release.

And a good one at that. I've used it for years before switching to Fedora.

[CTown]

I don't use it anymore (since for some reason I get slow speeds on Wifi) but in regards to release schedule, I liked the way Chakra. They seperate their packages in different repositories and keep the base ones stable (untill it's time for an upgrade) and keep updating the desktop, apps, and games repositories. So it's a semi-rolling distro does, right?

Oh, and I also disliked pacman and Appset. Though I loved the AUR and CCR.