OpenSUSE To Offer a Rolling Release Repository

dkd903 writes "While the rumors of Ubuntu moving to a rolling release have been brought to a halt, another major Linux distribution is looking to provide a rolling release. In a message to the opensuse-project mailing list, openSUSE developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a new project – openSUSE Tumbleweed. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed will provide a rolling release for those openSUSE users who wishes to have a rolling release. It will essentially be a repo containing the latest stable versions of the applications."

Linux Mint Debian

[future assassin]

For those who want a Debian based distro Linux Mint Debian will be a rolling release. http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1527 [linuxmint.com]

Gentoo?

[ajclements]

This is basically what Gentoo does. The only numbered releases they have are the annualish install discs. And if you go with the minimal install, even that doesn't draw much from the install medium, you download all the current packages.

Re:What's the fascination with "rolling releases"?

[TheRaven64]

Yup, and in BSD land it works well. You update the system periodically, either just tracking security updates or updating to get new features, and you update third-party software independently. With FreeBSD, you have a choice of following the cutting edge branch (-CURRENT), which is not recommended for anyone except developers, the mostly-tested (-STABLE) branch, which is fine for people who want to play with new stuff, or a release branch (-RELENG) that has had some extra testing and generally only incorporates bug fixes between releases. Each port / package is flagged with the versions of the base system that it supports and can be updated individually. You never need to upgrade the kernel or core userland to get a new version of something like KDE or GNOME (unless it actually depends on a newer feature in the base system, which is very rare).

The problem for Linux distributions is that everything is a third-party package, aside from some distro-specific management tools. Most of the time, these tools are relatively unimportant - you can easily work without them. It gets even worse when you try to do back-ports, because some things like glibc and Linux are very closely tied - for example, the RHEL kernel contains a couple of back-ported system calls that don't have the their glibc wrappers, so you can only get at them by making the system call directly, rather than via the libc interface.

Re:A certain irony.

[rubycodez]

any stats will be very rough estimates and completely depend on what B.S. methodology you wish to use. I took distrowatches distro popularity page, took the top 23 which included everything I care about, and normalized Ubuntu 10%
Mint 8.6
Fedora 8.6
openSUSE 6.7
Debian 6.4
Sabayon 5.1
PCLinuxOS 4.3
Arch 4.1
Ultimate 3.5
CentOS 3.5
Puppy 3.5
Mandriva 3.2
MEPIS 3.1
Red Hat 3.0
Unity 2.8
Slackware 2.8
Chakra 2.7
Macpup 2.6
Tiny Core 2.5
Pinguy 2.4
BackTrack 2.2
FreeBSD 2.2
Gentoo 2.1

Re:A certain irony.

[rubycodez]

should have mentioned that's hit for last month (not the 12 month column they also have), and kept the FreeBSD in there for relative comparison purposes, since I care about BSD though not that particular one.