What exactly is the point of rolling release? My pc (well, the cpu) is 15 years old, I dont need bleeding edge updates. Or is it for security ?
What exactly is the point of rolling release? My pc (well, the cpu) is 15 years old, I dont need bleeding edge updates. Or is it for security ?
To be able to predict when something you depend on breaks.
This “something” could be as “insignificant” as a UI change that breaks your workflow.
For instance, GNOME desktop threw out X11 session support with the latest release (good riddance!) but you might for example depend on GNOME’s X11 session for a workflow you’ve used for many years.
With rolling, those breaking changes happen unpredictably at any time.
It is absolutely possible for that update to come out while you’re in a stressful phase of the year where you need to finish some work to hit a deadline. Needing to re-adjust your workflow during that time would be awful and could potentially have you miss the deadline. You could simply not update but that would also make you miss out on security/bug fixes.
With stable, you accumulate all those breaking changes and have them applied at a pre-determined time, while still receiving security/bug fixes in the mean time.
In our example that could mean that the update might even be in a newer point release immediately but, because your point release is still supported for some time, you can hold on on changing any workflows and focus on hitting your deadline.
You need to adjust your workflow in either case (change is inevitable) but with stable/point releases, you have more options to choose when you need to do that and not every point in time is equally convenient as any other.