Any Debian Based Rolling Release Distros?

[MaxIBoy]

Debian Testing is good. Seemed to work OK for the 30 seconds I ran on it between upgrading from Lenny and upgrading to Sid after two different fresh installs. (Seriously though, I have used it extensively and it's a great distro. I was just impatient to get Xinput 2 as soon as possible.)

These days, I use Debian Unstable with the Experimental repositories enabled, because that's... how I roll. (Ba-dum Tish!)

Or you can try Sidux, it's a stabilized rolling release based on (and kept mostly in sync with) Debian Unstable. Haven't tried it myself, so I can't really recommend it. But that might be what works for you.

[Techsnap]

Yes, I just reloaded Debian testing and installed XFCE.

[snowpine]

Sidux and Arch are really the two main contenders for "best rolling release distro for former Ubuntu users." (IMHO) Sidux is great because it's a ready-to-go Live CD, you just pop it in and you have a full Sidux install in less than 15 minutes. Because Ubuntu is based on Debian Sid, Sidux is a great "preview" of what future Xubuntu/Kubuntu releases might be like. (No Gnome at the present time.) It is also easy for Ubuntu users because, being Debian based (as per the OP) it uses apt package management. Arch (as you know) is more roll-your-own (but don't let that intimidate you; it is an easy and fun weekend project for anyone with a DIY mindset). Because Arch is "desktop agnostic" you can easily install Gnome to make it look like Ubuntu. The "drawback", of course, is that it's not Debian-based. In my opinion this is not a bad thing from a stability point of view: Debian Sid/Testing is very much geared towards testing new features for the next Debian Stable release as its end goal, whereas Arch isn't testing for anything and is designed to be "stable" (in the "usable and reasonably bug free" sense of the word) as-is. Debian (especially Testing) also has a tendency to be "cyclical" in the sense that it freezes for a while prior to a Stable release, then gets really exciting for a while afterwards.

Either way, rolling releases have their own challenges, for sure. Really it's just a question of how you prefer to divvy up your system maintenence: a little bit each week (rolling release) or a lot every 6 months (time based release).

[kevCast]

The big problem/one of the great things about Debian is its policy. It's the reason my wireless doesn't work in testing, why they don't have python 2.6, and why the rest of it is so cohesive and awesome.

[eric71]

There's two Debian testing based distros I've tried in addition to the Debian testing weekly iso itself:

A very Ubuntu-esque distro, Gnome-based using Synaptic is Parsix.

A live cd with installer with either KDE or Xfce versions is PureOS. It has an installer, but there were some quirks related to permissions when I used it, so maybe this one isn't quite ready for production systems.

I also have used the KDE testing isos from Debian. I get a little frustrated because it's very difficult to do some administrator setup things - I can never seem to get graphical apps to run as su from terminal. It makes it harder to update sources.list, access external drives, etc.

As other people have mentioned, Mepis does keep major apps updated even running over a stable Lenny base. And I've found that enabling squeeze repos to install a few packages and then hashing them out again can solve the situations where newer things aren't in Mepis' repository.

I've been on a bit of a quest for an up to date rolling distro, and have been bouncing between many. Chakra will be nice when it is a little more mature, but I keep being drawn back to Debian and trusty Synaptic.

[amarendra]

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[amarendra]

How can that be done? How to make Ubuntu almost a rolling-release?

[Tibuda]

How can that be done? How to make Ubuntu almost a rolling-release?

You can always use the development version (lucid right now). You'll have to change your sources.list every 6 months.

[swoll1980]

I agree. Personally I like ARCH .

Didn't realize Arch was based off Debian, or was that just your way of trying to squeeze Arch into every single thread?

[TeemuN]

I noticed that in Debian testing the firefox version is still 3.5 (also in sid) but in Ubuntu 9.10 the version is 3.6.3 if you install from launchpad repos. Is there a reason to keep this older version or are developers just busy?

This really makes no sense to me as I was thinking to change from Ubuntu to Debian only for more recent versions of software and this doesn't seem very "rolling" to me. Also I want to install sofware from repos, not to lurk billion web pages for newer .debs.