this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I don't know how you deal with non rolling releases on your machines you actually use for work. By the end of the lifecycle all the tools are ancient
For servers I don't want rolling releases. That just means stuff is going to break on a regular basis. In my opinion, Arch Linux is the worst offender here. I don't know if it's gotten better since last I used it. But with Arch Linux the problem was, that you had to keep up with the updates. If you forgot to update some machine in a while, it could happen that you missed some update that changed some critical things, and everything else already moved on, and the only way to fix it was to hunt down the intermediate package version and try to install that manually, or just wipe and reinstall.
As far as "ancient" tools is concerned, it depends on what those tools are. Bugfix and security patches is what I'm most interested in on a server. Just because there is a newer version of software out there with some new features, doesn't mean that I need those features, or that they're relevant.
For the cases where I need something newer, there's docker, flatpak and backports repos, (if not third party repos for certain tools).
Yeah I wasn't talking about servers.