this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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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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This is admittedly anecdotal, but my experience with point releases is that things still break, and when they do, you're often stuck with the broken thing until a new release comes out. For this reason, among others, dist-upgrades tend to be extremely nervewracking.
With a rolling release, not only are fixes for broken things likely to release faster - if something does break, you can pin that package, and only that package, to an older version in the meantime. Then again, I've been using Arch almost exclusively on my desktop for about 7 years and I've never had to do this. I don't doubt that things have broken for people, but as far as I'm concerned, Arch just works.
As far as security goes, I don't think there's much, if any, advantage. Debian, the stablest of them all, still gets security updates in a timely fashion.
Dist upgrade is only dangerous for the people who do it. Wait a few weeks before upgrading to the new release and most broken things will be fixed already. I used arch a lot, and I do like the idea of rolling releases, but at this point for the couple programs I need new features in, I just build them from source.
Rolling vs. point release is not about whether a breaking change happens or not but when.
With rolling, breaking changes could happen at any time (even when inconvenient) but are smaller and spread out.
With point release, you get a big chunk of breaking changes all at once but at predictable points in time, usually with migration windows.