[lug] Fedora vs Ubuntu vs Mint

[Lee Woodworth]

On 07/19/2017 08:13 PM, Davide Del Vento wrote:
>>> For me the problem with Fedora is the crazy release schedule.
>> I'm also a bit curious how I'd like Arch, with the rolling release model.
> 
> I've never tried Arch, but I've tried two or three rolling releases and
> they are a pain. They "roll down the hill" (so to speak) without notice and
> without a useful "wait a moment" period. Basically you are continuous
> upgrading and that's bad (see below).

I've been using Gentoo for many years. It is a source-based rolling release
model. Updates don't happen unless you initiate them. There have been some
hiccups but part of that was my fault for waiting too long between updates.
So if you are going to use a rolling release distro make sure you do regular
updates. About once a week seems to be a good interval. Part of this can be
be automated with cron.

Unlike released-based distros an update won't necessarily have a lot of packages
in it. The number of packages is proportional to the time between updates and the
churn of the installed packages. openvpn isn't updated frequently for instance.
More frequent updates make it less likely that there will be major version
bumps of multiple packages in a single update.

The ease of updating configs seems to be a big factor in how difficult an update
feels. Gentoo  does not overwrite updates. The package system installs new
versions as pending and has tools where you can do a diff between existing
and pending and even do a manual merge on a per config-file basis. So for me
the config update process isn't usually a big deal, except for lvm which always
seems to be twiddling the config file.

For example while writing this I have updated a perimiter system. We've been away
so it's been about three weeks since the last update. 23 packages, half of them for
perl, bind-9.11.0 to 9.11.1, a kernel source update, grep, minor bumps on libgcrypt
and some miscellaneous tools. There have been weeks where there were no package
updates for this system. For this particular update there are no config file changes.
Amount of time needed for starting commands and reviewing the update list is about
5 minutes.

Of late I have been using debian in a vm. Funny thing is between the constant stream
of security updates it doesn't feel like it takes less time to manage. I could rant
about various things in addition to systemd. Seriously, since when did the concept of
install the nginx package mean install nginx and start it which is what debian
unexpectedly to did to me.