Hello! I’m thinking about switching from my beloved fedora to a rolling release distro, because it really intrigues me, but I’m a bit scared of Arch, it’s still too soon for me to go down this rabbit hole XD
what do you think about debian testing? It’s not a “true” rolling release as long as I understand, but it “practically” behaves like one, correct? On the system informations I still see Debian 12, what will happen when Debian 13 stable will be released?

sorry if these are silly questions and thanks to all in advance!

  • @_HR_
    6•1 year ago

    Just keep in mind that you will not be receiving speedy security updates, and in some cases you will need to wait for quite a while before packages you have will be updated (weeks, maybe longer).

    If you want a proper rolling release distro that is not Arch/Gentoo/Void/Nix/GuixSD, you could go for openSUSE, which provides a rolling release distro with a system rollback feature by default. Nice, easy to use GUIs for whatever you need. Although openSUSE also is sometimes a bit slow with the security updates for some packages, it’s nowhere near as slow as Debian testing.

    • tubbaduOP
      4•1 year ago

      thanks for the answer! I am also considering openSUSE

    • TunaCowboy
      2•1 year ago

      Integrating debsecan with apt and pulling security updates from experimental and unstable is trivial as demonstrated here.

      • @_HR_
        1•1 year ago

        What you’re proposing is creating a Frankendebian, which Debian explicitly warns against doing. The proper way of getting security patches from unstable would be to pull the source debs and compile it yourself against the current Debian testing base.

        This lane of thinking however seems to be completely misguided when it comes to the target audience here, that is, a user who is not even experienced with Linux in general enough to know about various rolling release distros. Telling a user this inexperienced to go with either of those is in bad taste at the very least.