Observations re. ease of use/reliability rolling release vs fixed/ish

[handy]

Horrible title I know... lol

I always check the Manjaro forum & the MX forum, one after the other. Been doing that for roughly a year & a half now (however long I've been using MX). (I started using Arch in early 2008, moved to Manjaro in late 2011.)

Something that I've noticed is that there are more problem posts in the Manjaro forum than there are in the MX forum. I know that Manjaro is put together by very capable & dedicated people (just like the MX distro is). I think that a, if not the, prime reason for most of the extra trouble that Manjaro users experience, is due to the nature of the package management system (which I love by the way :) ).

Arch users have more problems to solve. Manjaro is built to be Arch that I Linux novice can use, & therefore attracts quite a number of first time Linux users. As I believe MX does. I think it happens when you are top of, or close to the top of Distrowatch.

Manjaro tests the Stable Arch packages & then moves them through Unstable, Testing, Stable repos. In an effort to smooth out the bumps/bugs that come down from upstream. (That isn't all that is done to make life easier - the hardware management, particularly that of the GPU's is really most excellent.)

Anyway, it is just something that I've noticed, & I most certainly have had a lot of past experience with Arch (in the old days - I left when the systemd community sh*t fight happened) & Manjaro & their package management.

Generalisations are always both true & false...

[dreamer]

Well, rolling release is more problematic than stable - just look at Windows 10 vs Windows 7. Microsoft brought rolling release to 1 billion people... It's the dream, set up once and never again, but I think it only works well on fixed hardware such as Xbox or Playstation. It's not possible to test one million different PC configurations.

When hardware becomes powerful and cheap and close to zero heat (I wish), we can all use the same hardware and then software upgrades will be easy to test and deploy. Until then, a driver update (or kernel upgrade) will be one man's blessing and another man's curse.

[LysarZ]

I used PCLinuxOS until they stopped supporting 32-bit. It's rolling and had few problems. Of course, their repository has much fewer packages for them to maintain.

[malspa]

Generalisations are always both true & false...

Yup!

I'd certainly expect a rolling-release distro to be more problematic and less reliable than a fixed-release distro. Kinda seems like a given.

Perhaps Manjaro really does attract more novice Linux users than MX does.

I haven't used Manjaro, but (after getting it installed and set up) Arch Linux is a lot less trouble than I expected it to be, and much better (in my opinion) than any other rolling-release distro I've tried. But so much depends on the user and what the user does with the system. For example, I'll use KDE Plasma with Kubuntu LTS or GNOME Shell with Debian Stable, but with a rolling-release distro I'd rather go with something that doesn't change as much and doesn't bring in as many updates (like Xfce or a window manager).

I don't recall ever starting a thread at the Arch forums to try to get help with a problem. But I wasn't new to Linux when I got started with Arch. I know that if I had been having very many issues, I would have dumped Arch long ago.

[JayM]

On the one hand I kind of like the idea of rolling releases: install it once and run your upgrades regularly and you'll always have the most up-to-date version. On the other hand I like the idea of being in control of when or if I update my distro to newer releases even if doing so is more work on my part (backing up data, reinstalling the distro, reconfiguring it the way I want, reinstalling my apps, restoring data.) It usually only needs to be done once a year, and anyway it's probably not a bad idea to do an annual fresh reinstallation to get rid of cruft. With rolling release distros their major releases' changes get kind of forced on people like when many KDE distros went to Plasma/KDE5 a few years ago. There was a lot of consternation on PCLOS's forum when that happened, with people having to ask "OK, how do I do this? Where did they move that to? Why did they remove such-and-such?" It was merely a matter of learning and getting used to Plasma when people were already used to KDE4 (or was it 3.5? I can't remember) but people still didn't like it very much at first. It's better to let the users be in control of their own computer systems.

[Fast-Game]

IMHO for the KDE Plasma user rolling release distro's are the way to go. KDE is under constant development and bug fixes. Between Plasma 5.14.5 (many fixed distro's) and Plasma 5.16.5 (rolling distro's) bunch of bugs have been fixed.

[malspa]

With rolling release distros their major releases' changes get kind of forced on people like when many KDE distros went to Plasma/KDE5 a few years ago.

With Arch, IgnorePkg or IgnoreGroup can be used in pacman.conf, so the user does have control over that sort of thing. I'm assuming that the same applies to Manjaro.

[handy]

Yes, you can easily block packages from being updated via pacman.conf. There are likely other ways with the various GUI's that were provided at different times for those that don't like editing config files. But I don't know about them, as I never used any of them. I really like pacman.

I think that for Manjaro, a problem is that a rolling release system is quite a learning experience for first time & inexperienced Linux users. The relative ease for a new user, to just install (or run from live media) MX or antiX & not have the added stress of needing to learn about a totally unfamiliar kind of package management.

For some of us, life can be tough enough just having to learn about an entirely new kind of OS & how it functions. Where is everything? Learning replacement applications for what you've been used to on MS or Apple systems.

You may even have business or study stress on top of all of that. Or family pressures...

Life's tough isn't it! :)

I do understand why so many people like the simplicity of OS/X. The same menu items in the same places across applications & such. It really makes things so much easier for those that want to get stuff done & don't give a hoot about the OS, manufacturer or any of that. They want expediant results. (Personally I find OS/X incredibly boring... :) I have different needs/desires.)

[malspa]

I think that for Manjaro, a problem is that a rolling release system is quite a learning experience for first time & inexperienced Linux users. The relative ease for a new user, to just install (or run from live media) MX or antiX & not have the added stress of needing to learn about a totally unfamiliar kind of package management.

For some of us, life can be tough enough just having to learn about an entirely new kind of OS & how it functions. Where is everything? Learning replacement applications for what you've been used to on MS or Apple systems.

You may even have business or study stress on top of all of that. Or family pressures...

Hm. Sometimes I forget what it was like. This gave me flashbacks; when I started out with Linux, my plate was quite full with a lot of other things that were going on in my life, and for about a year I didn't do much with my Linux system besides basic things. I still had my XP computer for more serious work, and when I had time, I'd play around with Linux.

And that was with a Linspire computer; the system came preinstalled, and I didn't have to concern myself with any hardware issues. Then I found Mepis and started to learn things. But that first year (before I knew anything about Mepis) was very slow going, and I think I would have been quite lost with something like antiX, or even MX or Linux Mint. I don't think a rolling-release distro would have been good in that situation, not even something like Manjaro.

[anticapitalista]

I've been running antiX rolling (via sid repos) on my desktop since 2012 with no serious issues .. and systemd-free!
One reason for its success is almost certainly down to the fact it uses window managers and no full desktop environments such as xfce or kde.