The Case Against LTS on the Desktop

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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I generally don’t have these problems I run interm releases with new hardware and stop at a LTS release. I don’t take much pleasure in admining machines so I like to keep updates limited to bug and security fixes. If a Major feature come out I want I will swap back to a interm release and ride those to the next LTS.

I don’t run mainline Ubuntu, though. I run Kubuntu or Neon depending on the machine because GNOME doesn’t mesh with me.

I rather like Debian stable for my set it and forget it boxes. Once a week I ssh to them and spend about 2 minutes managing them.

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Ah, I see you too are a man of culture.

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Nice

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Oh Reginald…

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Looolll…

I DISAGREE

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Lts. long term support is great when your repositories are kept concurrent But if not you often end up with defunct repositories and the issue of trying to get your software updated.
Ive seen many a good distro drop off the face of the earth due to people just giving up on them.
a damn good example was ARK linux. It was simple to install, easy to understand, easy to update, and our forum was very friendly and helpful!
But the author and chief admin of the distro and forum lived with his parents, (he was underage at the time) and a brilliant kid and mother thought that linux was the work of the devil (Stupid religious nut) and she destroyed his computers.

Its the issue of the changing repository not to mention end of life which has kind pushed me away from buntu’s

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I´m running Ubuntu Mate 18.04 for over two years now,
and never really had a major issue with it.
But it’s running on an older machine.

Still i don´t really like the direction that Canonical is going.
And i will likely not upgrade to 20.04.
At the point when 18.04 gets out of support,
i will likely go with Linux Mint 20.x, LMDE or something else like maybe Fedora or Open Suse.

LTS works great for older systems in most cases.
However like with everything, there are always exceptions.
When new hardware comes out, a LTS based distro will generally need some time to catch up.
in case of Mint, you can try their hardware enablement kernels when they become available.
But that is generally the thing that most rolling release distributions are a bit faster with.

But in the end, everybody should use a distro that fits their needs best.
And of course a distro that works best with your particular hardware.
In the end all these debates about distro X vs Y are kinda pointless.
Because it´s like highly depending on your personal needs and hardware.
Still in the end, under the hood they are pretty much all gnu linux.
There is really no definite right or wrong here. :slight_smile:

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my only problem with 20.04 LTS is the damn SMB mounting is broken! from what i was reading they pull a bunch of backwards compatibility stuff and 20.04 LTS will likely be my last. the new zfs support came in handy with 20.04

i’m running it on an x570 with a ryzen 1600AF, rtx2070 and some older accessories

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If you slide over to Mint 20.0, SMB works nice.

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Just wanted to throw out there that I installed Gentoo on a 2-3 year old Dell Latitude and everything Just Worked out of the box. Installed the base, changed profile and installed Gnome, instantly had wifi, touch screen, touch pad, everything. Gentoo (specifically portage) does have a steeper learning curve, but it’s not as bad as everyone makes it out to be

Oh, and this was installed on ZFS on Root on EFI

Ok, so I kinda lied, the wifi wouldn’t work behind a captive portal, but I read the wiki, changed ONE config file, and that was it, I SWEAR!

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yeah though about distro hopping but having more than 1 linux machine in the house i’m tired of auto discovery not working and having fstab so maybe it’s time i spun up an NFS share in windows server on top of the SMB share.

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if I were to pick a desktop distribution for use in some company I’d probably want the OS to stay on the same version for as long as possible just so I wouldn’t run into “this thing worked like that but now after some update it works like this”, and I’d probably go with CentOS for that (10 year support) or just RHEL…

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I was on tumbleweed for about 10 months after upgrading my pc last year and everything worked pretty nicely from the go. Only a few times I would have to boot with an older kernel after the latest one wouldn’t boot, or broke something else, as they sometimes jump to new kernels very fast, sometimes even the .0 release.
Finally a major update (2800+ packages) broke my system to a point that I decided to switch back to Mint.

I am on the fence about the issue really, as being on the bleeding edge does appeal to me as I’m always excited for new and future features and functionality, but then again stability and reliability are nice too…
At least Mint has an easy way to install a recent(ish) supported(!)kernel (will be 5.8 soon, I assume) and a current ppa for Mesa. This will be enough adventure for me for the time being, as I am not planning any upgrades any time soon.

You definitely need to plan your upgrades a lot more carefully and make sure you have the required kernel/mesa/etc available, when you are on LTS. I would almost suggest waiting for the next major release if upgrading to something released after the previous one, to get the most stable experience.
On a rolling release you will probably have support in a matter of weeks.

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I started with Red Hat 5, back in the mid-90’s. Since then, I’ve tried a little bit of everything. Honestly, they are all pretty much the same, in the sense that I can make just about any distro do what I want, but I’m not looking for a hobby. I choose rolling distros (because I want to change/upgrade distros on my schedule, not someone else’s) which have defaults that most closely align with my preferences, so that I don’t feel compelled to always be tinkering with it.

Theoretically, a LTS release should be more stable, but how stable is stable? Any distribution of Linux is going to spank Windows, when it comes to stability.

For the past 3-4 years I’ve primarily run Solus/Budgie, although I have a look at Ubuntu/Budgie and Manjaro/Budgie from time to time. For some reason, Ubuntu feels less snappy to me and Manjaro always seems to misbehave. Honestly, it’s usually a hassle just to get it installed and updated. The last time I installed it (about a month ago), the keys were all jacked up. I always seems to be something! Frankly, Arch is less aggravating than Manjaro, but I never seem to learn.

KDE seems to be all the rage these days. I didn’t like KDE 2 and KDE 3 was just as disagreeable and to make matters worse, it was bloated as hell. But I let curiosity get the better of me. I chose a distro that doesn’t get much mind share and threw it onto an old ThinkPad. Surprisingly, over the past year, it hasn’t annoyed me … which is unusual.

If you’re looking for a rolling distribution, let me suggest that you check out PCLinuxOS. It’s an independent distro, that’s kinda old school. It looks sleek though, running KDE. It works great on old hardware and the community is both helpful and friendly. I’ve seen nary a RTFM in their forum. The repo is overflowing and it uses apt/synaptic for management. They have both a basic ISO with none of the bloat, as well as an ISO containing everything but the kitchen sink.

PCLinuxOS may never live on all of my machines, but I plan on keeping it around for a good long while. IMHO, it is under rated and under appreciated. Oh, and for those who feel strongly about their init system, you’ll find SysV under the hood.