On 01/19/2013 06:55 PM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
It is unfortunate you've been having problems. But the trouble with making transitions still doesn't make Arch not rolling release. The arch devs generally expect a certain level of diligence on the part of their users and usually make a point of putting news about impending rocky transitions on their site.On Sun, 20 Jan 2013 01:39:55 +0100, Yaro Kasear <yaro@marupa.net> wrote:Linux system I'd recommend Arch instead.Which I don't call a rolling release. Arch was my preferred distro. If you have a distro with releases you can make hard transitions. For Ubuntu the transition from init to upstart wasn't an issue, for Arch the transition from init to systemd made me dropping Arch for the moment.
But still, and don't interpret me as being aggressive here: Just because you had problems doesn't preclude a system from being rolling release. Arch is *precisely* what rolling release is. And it's my preferred model to waiting for my distributor to come around to making a new "hard transition" before I can get a new kernel, for example.
BUT, that is a matter of preference.To the OP, and back on topic here: Debian is a wonderful system. It's fantastic for applications where you may prefer outright stability even at the expense of having "latest" software. Going to testing somewhat alleviates the age of packages at the sacrifice of a little quality control. Right now, since Wheezy is in the process of "going stable" Testing is in a general freeze, and I'm not sure how much that's affected the versions of packages. This makes testing get described as "semi-rolling release" though it'll still be generally more frequently updated than things such as Linux Mint Debian Edition, also reportedly a semi-rolling release.
Bottom line for desktop users on Debian is your biggest "issues" will likely be contending with the "free software" enthusiasm of the Debian development team. It's a good thing, generally, but has the big disadvantage of making it very hard to get the use of your hardware unless you make use of packages often considered by Debian as "unsupported." This is not generally a major roadblock except at install time if you have a wifi chipset and no physical access to your router. Wifi has an unfortunate model of requiring OS-provided firmware (An all-around poor model of hardware support, in my opinion.), which in Linux is usually supplied by firmware those like the Debian developers consider "non-free" and exclude from the official install media. This'll make it difficult, sometimes even impossible, to install Debian without considerable support (Or unofficial custom media with the firmware back in.).
I'm not the type who gets overly concerned about licensing, though. Even the "non-free" stuff provided for Debian in their official repos or in many third party repos is perfectly safe and usable.