rolling releases

By basd on Apr 5, 2009 | In kde4, linux

I always wondered, why do we have "release dates"? Why do we have "new installs" every few months?

...

Then I saw a post on Planet KDE mentioning that the commenter had just decided to use the Chakra distro, which is based on Arch Linux.

The nicely laid out Chakra website mentions that Chakra is a "rolling distro," as is Arch, on which it is based.

As it turns out (for those of us who didn't know) a "rolling distro" is one that does not actually have "releases". Instead, the main development line is kept stable and is incrementally improved. So, if you keep up with updates, you always have the latest "release."

Didn't know about this. I've always wonder whether, if I subscribed to the correct repositories, my OpenSUSE would just plain "stay current" -- or whether it was actually necessary to do a fresh install of the new release.

As far as I have been able to discern, the install is necessary. And (as my recent disaster suggests) sometimes that actually means "clean install".

Not efficient. Lost time is lost productivity. I will have to be testing a rolling distro -- good thing I have some spare computers lying around not doing much.

Oh, wait! Gotta get some work done!!!