Summary: Which Linux distribution is stable yet up-to-date

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Omer and all,

a few recent notes:

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 8:10 PM, Omer Zak <w1 at zak.co.il> wrote:

> Yesterday I posted my question about selecting a Linux distribution to
> serve as the host Linux distribution for a system which runs Docker and
> a virtualization system.
>
> For such a system, I'll want to use a stable but up-to-date kernel.
>
> Unstable distributions will be operated inside a virtual machine or a
> Docker container, as needed.
>
> Several people responded with suggestions.
>
> Rabin Yasharzadehe suggested Arch and Fedora - both as unstable
> distributions.
> Shlomi Fish suggested Mageia, which gets a release roughly every 9
> months. Its unstable counterpart is Cauldron. He had a problem using
> VirtualBox (the virtualization solution which I am currently using) on
> Mageia.
>

Actually, yesterday I was able to reproduce the aforementioned freeze (on
Xfce the mouse and keyboard completely stop working and I have not choice
but to do a hard reboot) without having ever run VirtualBox in the session
and with an untainted kernel (but while having run KVM). So the problem may
have nothing to do with VBox and may also be peculiar to my machine.


> Yuval Adam claims that Arch Linux manages to be extremely stable without
> losing the ability to get frequent updates.
> Jeremy Hoyland suggested the use of Linux Mint. But he said nothing
> about its stability.
> Steve Litt proposes the use of a rolling release. He recommends Void as
> more stable than the alternatives. Unlike me, systemd use or avoidance
> is for him a religious issue.
> Sara Fink suggests Gentoo, which has what to offer to both sides of the
> systemd divide. Not clear how stable is it.
> Tzafrir Cohen pointed out that Debian Stable strives to maintain a
> stable interface to Kernel modules.
>
> The winners so far are Arch and Void.
>

I would recommend against Arch Linux because, like I said, its
installations can be left in an unusable state if one forgets to update it
frequently enough. I'm not sure about Void Linux as I never used it.

Regards,

-- Shlomi Fish

-- 
------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/

Chuck Norris helps the gods that help themselves.

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