I need a recommendation

Terryv · April 17, 2017

I've been a long time Ubuntu user and I'm getting tired of reinstalling the OS whenever I want to upgrade to a newer version. Like going to 14.04 to 16.04 for example.

I'm now looking for a distro using a rolling release. I've played around with Manjaro and openSUSE and was wondering what else was worth my time to look into, in the end I will be choosing only one and I'm not someone to distro hop.

What do you guys use?

Edit: being able to quickly and easily swap kernels is a huge perk for me.

Wild Penquin · April 17, 2017

It's been a while since the last time I used a non-rolling-release distribution, but the last time I did, I think the upgrade process should be quite painless? Also, usually they do offer an upgrade path that doesn't require a full reinstall?

Anyways, usually just backing up /home and /etc should take care of ~95% of the restoration of old settings.

As for actually answering your questions: Any rolling release distro will not be as well tested as a non-rolling release distribution (by definition); which means things might break more often (although, some rolling release distributions might not be that near to "bleeding edge" than others). From my personal experience, I can only talk about Manjaro and Arch, though, since I have not used others.

What distribution to choose, depends on your use case and needs. I'm not sure there is enough information in your starting post to give any recommendations. Arch works fine for me (but I'm quite experienced with Linuxes and can fix it if/when it breaks). Manjaro seems to be a bit spread about currently, on what they are trying to achieve.

There's also Antergos, which I've only fired up once, but haven't really used it much.

Terryv · April 17, 2017

25 minutes ago, Wild Penquin said:

It's been a while since the last time I used a non-rolling-release distribution, but the last time I did, I think the upgrade process should be quite painless? Also, usually they do offer an upgrade path that doesn't require a full reinstall?

Anyways, usually just backing up /home and /etc should take care of ~95% of the restoration of old settings.

As for actually answering your questions: Any rolling release distro will not be as well tested as a non-rolling release distribution (by definition); which means things might break more often (although, some rolling release distributions might not be that near to "bleeding edge" than others). From my personal experience, I can only talk about Manjaro and Arch, though, since I have not used others.

What distribution to choose, depends on your use case and needs. I'm not sure there is enough information in your starting post to give any recommendations. Arch works fine for me (but I'm quite experienced with Linuxes and can fix it if/when it breaks). Manjaro seems to be a bit spread about currently, on what they are trying to achieve.

There's also Antergos, which I've only fired up once, but haven't really used it much.

Ubuntu does offer an upgrade to newer versions, but I've found them to be a little unstable. A fresh install always works great.

This machine handles some virtualization and I always have to redo my config whenever I upgrade. Besides that it's a catch all for uses, not much gaming tho

I'm just fine with an arch based distro evem if it's bleeding edge, but not arch itself as I'm not good enough to get it set up myself.

fjdhdhcyfhf · April 18, 2017

You have described switching to a new ubuntu LTS. I think two years is pretty decent for a home user. In virus laden Win XP/win98 days I use to re-install every six weeks!

I might be wrong but i think mint is rolling release.

Arch is rolling release but you will get issues with proprietary drivers (nvidia) when something as significant as xserver upgrades.

Maybe you should put your /home on a seperate partition and get yourself a good backup process so that upgrading is not so painful?

if /home is in its own parition you can change distros and keep all your settings.

A good backup solution will let you switch between distros without loosing any programs, data, or settings.