DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 612, 1 June 2015

Feature Story (by Robert Storey)

Manjaro OpenRC 0.8.13 - reinventing init without systemd



Everything that can be invented has been invented.

- Charles Duell, Commissioner of US Patent Office, 1899



It would be an understatement to say that systemd's introduction as the dominant init system for modern Linux distros has stirred controversy. Both opponents and supporters of this new way of doing things have tended to get rather excited - to put it mildly - whenever the topic of systemd comes up on various tech blogs and forums. Defending one's choice of init systems from critics has become a sort of moral obligation, if not a way of life. Take the "wrong" side of the argument on your favourite tech forum, and you can expect a deluge of heated comments, frequently containing accusations of "troll" and even nastier descriptive words not suitable for publication.



I suppose it's natural for geeks to get emotional about their operating system. In fact, if you've seen the 2013 movie Her, it's predicted that in the near future not only will we be able to love our own personal operating system, but also have sex with it. Indeed, I think we're already there, to judge by the way people have become attached to their mobile handsets.





Figure 1: Linux users get emotional about systemd



The Great Search Begins



After many months of debate, things are starting to finally calm down now, and I see no reason to reignite the civil war. The pros and cons of systemd have been discussed ad nauseum on this and other forums, and by now most geeks have already formed their opinion on the issue. So let there be peace. It's time to bury the hatchet (and by that I don't mean burying it in your opponent's skull). Vive et vivat - Latin for "live and let live."



As things currently stand, if you're in the pro-systemd camp, you'll be spoiled for choice since most of the major distros have made the move. On the other hand, folks in the non-systemd camp have a relatively lean menu, but that may be changing. Up until now, the solution for non-systemd geeks has been to simply stick with what they've got and avoid making any upgrades. That strategy has worked pretty well, but it's got limited shelf life. Increasingly, non-systemd folks still running last year's software are starting to feel like passengers on the Titanic. Unless you're planning to disconnect your computer from the Internet, the need for security updates becomes unavoidable. Ignore all those update warnings for too long, and you risk sinking the whole ship.



Fortunately, the market for up-to-date non-systemd OS's has not gone unnoticed. Among the choices currently available are PCLinuxOS, Slackware, Void and all the BSDs. Gentoo has made systemd optional, offering the OpenRC init system as an alternative.



I have tried all of the above, but for one reason or another found the experience not totally satisfying. PCLinuxOS came very close to meeting my everyday needs, but lacked a few packages that I depend on for my work. Slackware remains my number one choice as a server OS, but its collection of desktop software is rather slim. On the other hand, source-based Gentoo has just about everything I could ever want in life, but the installation requires a great deal of time to compile (and recompile during updates) - I just don't have that much patience. PC-BSD proved to be a very capable desktop OS, but it lacked a few needed drivers for my hardware. Void Linux is very fast and undergoing rapid development, but to me felt unpolished - I will keep an eye on it for the future.



And then there is Manjaro OpenRC, a recent side project of mainstream Manjaro (which is systemd-based). Manjaro OpenRC recognized all my hardware immediately, and contains all the software packages I require. Indeed, the software collection is so large that it rivals Ubuntu's and Debian's. A nice little fringe benefit is fast performance. As a result, it is now my preferred operating system on both my laptop and desktop machines. Indeed, it works so well that I've considered sending a thank you note to the systemd developers for inspiring me to switch distros.



Manjaro OpenRC is mostly systemd free - it uses ConsoleKit2 instead of logind, and eudev instead of systemd-udev. However, it bundles some of the systemd libraries in a eudev-systemdcompat package, mostly due to how Arch packages systemd



Installation



Manjaro Linux is based on Arch, and was already popular even before the developers started offering an OpenRC edition. It currently ranks number 10 on the DistroWatch hit list. It is possible to take a systemd Manjaro installation and covert it to OpenRC, but most people will just find it easier to download the OpenRC edition and install it directly. I downloaded Manjaro Xfce 0.8.13-openrc from here. For announcements about future releases, and to receive support, check out this section of the Manjaro forum.



Like its Arch predecessor, Manjaro is a rather geeky distro that doesn't hold your hand. Manjaro boots up as a live CD, presenting an attractive Xfce interface. However, there is no Install icon on the desktop - you'll find it under Menu--> System--> Install Manjaro Linux. The OpenRC installer is text-mode based, running inside a terminal window (systemd-based Manjaro has a GUI installer). The most confusing part of the whole operation comes in the beginning, when you have to partition your hard drive. You're actually better off leaving the installation program and clicking Menu--> System--> GParted. Complete all your partitioning and formatting in nice user-friendly GParted, and only then resume with the text-mode installation program.



These days one can choose between either an MBR or GPT partitioning scheme, plus adding more complexity with virtualization, if you're so inclined. I chose to keep things simple: MBR partitions, no virtualization. I won't give a blow-by-blow replay of the whole installation procedure, but Linux veterans should find it straightforward enough. Probably the biggest decision one has to make is where to set up the boot loader/manager. Again, I stuck with tradition and put GRUB2 into the MBR. Fans of the GPT partitioning scheme might want to look into Rod Smith's rEFInd boot manager - his excellent web site will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about partitions and booting.



The Morning After



Like everything else in Manjaro, the installer does its job quickly. If all goes as planned, one reboot later should bring you to a graphical login screen. Upon logging in, you should be seeing the grey-coloured (but nonetheless good-looking) Manjaro Xfce desktop.





Figure 2: The Manjaro Desktop



To see which init system you are running, in a terminal type:



cat /proc/1/comm



The command should respond with "init." If it responds with "systemd," you've installed the wrong version of Manjaro.



Once you're through admiring your newly installed desktop, it's time to perform a few administrative chores. Like its Arch ancestor, Manjaro uses the pacman package manager. Coming from the Debian/Ubuntu universe, I was mainly familiar with apt-everything, so I had to spend some time learning the new dispensation. Fortunately, the pacman man page ("man pacman") provides a decent primer. Even better, check out the Manjaro wiki. You can also take advantage of the excellent Arch wiki to familiarize yourself with pacman and other Arch traits, most of which are highly relevant to Manjaro.



To get online, click Menu--> Internet--> Wicd to get yourself connected. With that accomplished, your first housekeeping task should be to update everything. You can accomplish that by typing in a terminal:



sudo pacman -Syu



This can take some time. Afterwards, a reboot would be in order. Manjaro uses a rolling release development model, so updates are frequent.



Your next priority should be setting up a firewall. Simplest and most effective is ufw, so try this:



sudo pacman -S ufw-openrc

sudo ufw enable

sudo rc-update add ufw default



The first command above installs ufw. Next command enables it, and last ensures that ufw will start on reboot.



Other very useful pacman commands worth memorizing include:



pacman -Ss search-string (search for "search-string" in package database)



pacman -Si package-name (give info about package "package-name")



sudo pacman -S package-name (install package "package-name")



sudo pacman -R package-name (remove package "package-name")



Hardcore geeks may think that GUIs are for wimps, but most desktop users will find it useful to install the package octopi. This provides a nice warm-and-fuzzy graphical interface for many pacman functions. You may also want to familiarize yourself with the command-line yaourt (visit "man yaourt"), another front-end for pacman.



For more pacman commands, check out the Manjaro Pacman wiki page. For more details on configuring OpenRC services, visit the Manjaro OpenRC wiki page.





Tips, Tricks and Hints - Printing





Setting up my HP-DeskJet printer/scanner proved to be a little tricky. One thing I learned: do not install package manjaro-printer because it includes gutenprint, which messes up everything. If you accidentally install gutenprint, uninstall it. What worked for me:



sudo pacman -S cups-openrc



sudo rc-service cupsd start



run "rc-update add cupsd default"



The developers have informed me that in the next release, cupsd will be already installed.



pacman -S hplip



pacman -S sane-openrc



hp-setup -i



If you don't have an HP printer, then Menu--> System--> Print Settings is your friend.





Tips, Tricks and Hints - Sound



Manjaro OpenRC uses ALSA by default, and my attempt to watch videos resulted in silent movies. I finally got sound working by installing packages:



manjaro-pulse

pavucontrol



Use pavucontrol to set up the output. One bug (still not resolved) is that in order to use my headphones, I first have to unplug and then replug them in to "wake up" the headphone port. That problem doesn't apply to the speakers.



Another bug bit me, but only on my laptop. On that machine I simply had no sound at all, and pavucontrol reported only "dummy output," which means that my sound card was not visible. I was finally able to fix that with this command:



sudo chmod 777 -R /dev/snd



This appears to be a "permissions error," but I'm not sure why it occurred on only one machine. Fortunately, the fix is easy.



Tips, Tricks and Hints - Automount



By default Manjaro-OpenRC does not automount removable drives (usb, etc). Thunar (the file manager) requires package "thunar-volman" to enable automounting.



sudo pacman -S thunar-volman



Open Thunar, click on:

Edit--> Preferences--> Advanced--> Volume_Management--> Configure-->

check - Mount removable drives when hot-plugged

check - Mount removable media when inserted (optional)



Another note from developers: thunar-volman will be installed by default in the next release.



Tips, Tricks and Hints - Tweaking BASH



The following is not really necessary, but it's something I do on every distro I install...



If you work at the command line, it's rather important to know which directory you are in, lest you accidentally delete, move or copy the wrong file. This can be done by customizing the command line prompt. Another good thing to do is to protect a file from being accidentally overwritten ("clobbered") by a command (you can override this with the >| redirection operator). Finally, you may want to set the key map so that ctrl-alt-backspace will break out of X and send you back to the login prompt.



Best way to set up the above is for individual users to create (or edit) a hidden .bashrc and .bash_profile file in the user's home directory. The following content in .bashrc will do the job:



PS1="\u@\h:\w> "

export PS1

alias rm='rm -i'

alias cp='cp -i'

alias mv='mv -i'

set -o noclobber

/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp



Even root can do this by placing the above .bashrc and .bash_profile content in /root.



Tips, Tricks and Hints - Magic keys



An old geeky trick that has been somewhat forgotten is the use of "magic keys" to safely reboot or shut down a misbehaving machine. Back in MS-DOS days, ctrl-alt-del did the job, but for Linux you need to hold down the alt-SysRq keys and then type the sequence "reisub" (to reboot) or "reisuo" (to shut down).



You can find a good discussion about magic SysRq keys here on Wikipedia.



Manjaro and most other distros now disable magic keys by default, but it's easy (if not intuitive) to reactivate this feature. Add (or edit) a line in file /etc/sysctl.d/100-manjaro.conf to say:



# Enable the Magic SysRq key

kernel.sysrq = 1



Alternately, you could create a new file in this same directory with the above content. One suggested name: /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf.



Tips, Tricks and Hints - Google Earth



I love Google Earth and use it in my work, but it's really a pain to install on most Linux distros, especially 64-bit systems. This is not the fault of Linux, but rather Google, because their developers for some strange reason seem to think that Linux is still a 32-bit operating system. And since Google Earth is not open source, Linux developers cannot fix the problem. (Hey Google, if you're reading this, how about coughing up a 64-bit version?)



Fortunately, some distros make it relatively easy to work around this problem. Manjaro does not have a Google Earth package, but there is one in the AUR (Arch User Repository), and I was able to install it on Manjaro with the yaourt command:



yaourt -a google-earth



You will be prompted to choose either Google Earth 6 or Google Earth 7. I highly suggest you go with version 6, which requires way fewer packages and is known to be far more stable. Despite a few dire warnings that flashed on my screen, the installation went well and I was able to start the program by typing "google-earth6" at the command line. The only weird thing is that I had some strange fonts that looked like Sanskrit. That was solved with another Arch package, installed thus:



yaourt -a ttf-ms-fonts



After doing that, perform a reboot so that the new fonts will take effect.



Conclusion



Manjaro-OpenRC boots fast, runs fast, is stable as the Rock of Gibraltar, and boasts an enormous software collection. There are some usually hard-to-find treasures hidden in the Manjaro repositories, such as Aegisub, Gramps and Gprename. Indeed, I even found one great program that is missing from every other distro's repository (Kompozer, which I use for web development). Furthermore, it's even possible to install additional programs from the immense AUR. The icing on the cake is the impressive documentation maintained by both Manjaro and Arch.



Far too much blood has been shed fighting the systemd civil war, and Manjaro should be lauded for taking a neutral approach. Offering both a systemd and OpenRC edition, the Manjaro developers are giving their users a chance to choose for themselves which init system they would like to run. This mature attitude should be admired and copied, helping to unite all geeks in a new spirit of mutual understanding and respect. No doubt this will lead to enlightenment and world peace, or at the very least, fewer flame wars.





Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

Fedora 22 released, Ubuntu's Community Council attempts to oust Kubuntu's lead developer, details on the Lumina desktop, FreeBSD gains 64-bit Linux emulation and Mandriva closes its doors



Fedora 22 was released last week and the latest version of the Red Hat sponsored project brought with it a number of new and interesting features. Fedora now uses the DNF package manager by default rather than YUM. Though the two package managers are quite similar users may notice slight differences, hopefully the most significant will be a speed-up in package transactions. The ARM spins of Fedora now have their own home on the Fedora website. In addition, there have been a number of improvements made to GNOME notifications and the Server edition's Cockpit software. Fedora's Project Leader, Matthew Miller, wrote, " Every Fedora release has its own character. If this release had a human analogue, it'd be Fedora 21 after it'd been to college, landed a good job, and kept its New Year's Resolution to go to the gym on a regular basis. What we're saying is that Fedora 22 has built on the foundation we laid with Fedora 21 and the work to create distinct editions of Fedora focused on the desktop, server, and cloud (respectively). It's not radically different, but there are a fair amount of new features coupled with features we've already introduced but have improved for Fedora 22. " More information on Fedora 22 can be found in the project's release announcement and release notes.



Shortly after Fedora 22 launched, a post appeared on the GNOME website which explains why a lot of packages available in Fedora's repositories may not show up in Fedora Workstation's software manager. " Quite a few people are going to be installing Fedora 22 in the coming days, searching for things in the software centre and not finding what they want. This is because some applications still don't ship AppData files, which have become compulsory for this release. So far, over 53% of applications shipped in Fedora ship the required software centre metadata, up from the original 12% in Fedora 21. If you don't like this, you can either use dnf to install the package on the command line, or set gsettings set org.gnome.software require-appdata false. " * * * * * In an unprecedented move, the Ubuntu Community Council has demanded that Kubuntu's lead developer, Jonathan Riddell, vacate all leadership roles, including his position on Kubuntu's Community Council. In an e-mail to Kubuntu's own Council, an Ubuntu Community Council member wrote, " At this time we have sent an email to Jonathan requesting that he step aside from all positions of leadership in the Ubuntu Community for at least 12 months. This request will require him to step aside from leadership in Kubuntu as well. " The notice came as a complete surprise to both Riddell and the rest of the Kubuntu Community Council. Scott Kitterman, one of Kubuntu's Council members has posted the back and forth e-mail communications between Ubuntu's representatives and Kubuntu's. The Kubuntu team, so far, has been unable to learn on what grounds Ubuntu has attempted to dismiss their leader and has expressed concern over the future of the Kubuntu project. Since the notice from the Ubuntu Community Council was delivered, the Kubuntu team has met and voted to keep Jonathan Riddell in his leadership positions. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu's founder, offered his opinion on the matter, writing, " It is therefore not a question of whether or not you accept the CC request to step down. This is a statement from the CC that we no longer recognize [Jonathan Riddell] as the leader of the Kubuntu community. " If keeping track of who everyone is and how this fits together seems confusing, this blog gives a good summary of the parties and actions involved. * * * * * The developers of the PC-BSD operating system have been working on the new Lumina desktop environment for several months now. The new desktop offers a responsive, lightweight interface that avoids many of the dependencies required to run other, heavier desktop environments. In particular, Lumina is attractive to BSD users as the desktop does not depend on any Linux-specific software. Ken Moore, Lumina's primary developer, recently gave a status update and outline of what Lumina is and what makes it different. " [Lumina is] designed on PC-BSD, specifically for the BSD community at large (although it is easily ported to any OS, including Linux distros) and does not require any of the commonly-used desktop implementation frameworks (DBUS, policykit, consolekit, systemd, HALD, etc..) " Moore reports Lumina has been ported to FreeBSD, Dragonfly BSD, OpenBSD, Debian's GNU/kFreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux. Further details can be found in Ken Moore's blog post. * * * * * The FreeBSD operating system has, for several years, had the ability to run 32-bit x86 executable files that were originally compiled to run on GNU/Linux distributions. Though Linux closed-source executables are rare, this compatibility layer has allowed FreeBSD users to run some Linux software without requiring access to the program's source code. The FreeBSD project is in the process of expanding their emulation capabilities and have introduced 64-bit x86 emulation for Linux binary files. The BSD Now podcast summary offers the following details: " For those who might be unfamiliar, FreeBSD has an emulation layer to run Linux-only binaries (as rare as they may be). The most common use case is for desktop users - enabling them to run proprietary applications like Adobe Flash or Skype. Similar systems can also be found in NetBSD and OpenBSD (though disabled by default on the latter). However, until now, it's only supported binaries compiled for the i386 architecture. This new update, already committed to -CURRENT, will open some new possibilities that weren't previously possible. " * * * * * Rumours have been circulating for a while now that the Mandriva organization was being liquidated. Unfortunately, it appears that there is truth to these comments that Mandriva is no longer functioning and its assets are being liquidated (document in French). At the time of writing the distribution's website is off-line. Mandriva, formally Mandrake Linux, was one of the early beginner friendly distributions and many Linux users got their first taste of Linux from Mandriva. The silver lining to this story is that Mandriva lives on in various community projects. Distributions such as Mageia and OpenMandriva carry on the tradition of making newcomer friendly operating systems with the same convenient system administration tools.



Following the news that Mandriva had shut its doors, the OpenMandriva team posted a fond farewell message on their blog. " Mandrake was the first distribution to make a free operating system available which could be installed and configured by anyone who could use a keyboard and a mouse. When many of us first came to the Linux world, there were two types of distro, the ones that gave you headaches as soon as you put the CD in the slot, and then there was Mandrake. The vision of its founder, Gael Duval, created an operating system which undoubtedly allowed many, many people access to modern technology and in doing so added greatly to the strength of the free software community. We do and will do our very best to continue to hold and carry their crown - for you. "





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Debian, Devuan and systemd



Where-are-the-alternatives asks: Leading up to Debian "Jessie" I heard all kinds of comments about forking Debian or making a new distro free from systemd. What happened to those projects? Why didn't Debian fork, did people just give up?



DistroWatch answers: There was talk of forking Debian, or at least creating a separate spin of Debian which would be very similar to vanilla Debian, but with systemd removed in favour of SysV init. The systemd-free fork of Debian is called Devuan and, based on the activity on the project's mailing list, I think people are still working on it. Time will tell whether Devuan will make a stable release and be successful or not.



Though not many people talked about it in this context, the Linux Mint project released a new version of Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) recently. Though LMDE, version 2, is based on Debian 8 "Jessie", it does not use systemd as its default init software. I do not think LMDE should be considered a fork of Debian, but it does offer a desktop solution that is Debian-based without systemd.



What I suspect happened with regards to forking Debian was, roughly, this: people followed the path of least resistance where systemd was concerned. People who wanted to use systemd simply upgraded their operating systems and started running it. People who did not wish to run systemd probably decided to take one of the following paths: Did not upgrade their distribution

Upgraded and then removed any unwanted software/services

Switched to a different operating system or distribution

Learned to adapt to the new software Any of the above options would be a lot less work than forking a distribution and releasing it to the public. The people who decided they did not like systemd probably either learned to live with it, migrate or simply decided to keep their existing operating system.



I was curious as to just how popular systemd is in the Debian community. Are the people who were upset by systemd still there, are they removing systemd and installing something else? Debian has a service the project calls Popularity Contest. The service, which is opt-in, keeps track of what software people install on their Debian computers. While not everyone submits package statistics to the Debian project, the Popularity Contest data can give us a rough idea of what software Debian users are running. Here is what the init software statistics looked like about a month after Debian 8 "Jessie" was released. The sample size is a total of 52,582 Debian "Jessie" installations.



Init software Installations % of total installs systemd 50,190 95 SysV 19,688 37 Upstart 25 0 OpenRC 41 0



As the above chart shows, there is some overlap with people installing multiple init packages. However, for people running Debian "Jessie", it appears though most are content to stay with the default configuration. I was also curious to see what portion of the Debian community was using the latest release of Stable and how many were using something else. It's hard to get an exact breakdown of numbers since Debian basically tracks the popularity of packages in Stable and the popularity across all versions, combined. All versions presumably being Old-Stable, Stable, Testing and Unstable.



According to the numbers I found, 186,461 machines had submitted Popularity Contest data on their packages. 52,582 (28%) of those installations were running Debian Stable. All the other branches of Debian combined made up 133,879 (72%) of the installations. There are probably lots more installations that do not submit package statistics, but this is what we have to work with. Of the 133,879 installations running branches of Debian other than Stable, here is the division of init software.



Init software Installations % of total installs systemd 7,530 6 SysV 131,269 98 Upstart 69 0 OpenRC 18 0



As you can see in the above chart, SysV init is still widely popular in branches of Debian other than the latest Stable release. Unfortunately, I was not able to find a breakdown of statistics for each branch of Debian, but I did find this chart (see the bottom of the page) which indicates there are approximately 22,000 installations of Debian 6 "Squeeze" submitting Popularity Contest data, another 94,000 installations of Debian 7 "Wheezy" and about 7,000 computers running either Testing or the Unstable branch. Those numbers combined come up just shy of the 133,879 installations of non-Stable Debian mentioned above.



Since the Popularity Contest numbers suggest there are more than twice the number of installations of Debian 6 and Debian 7 than there are installations of Debian 8 (and newer), that leads me to believe a large portion of the Debian community sees no need to upgrade their operating system. Put another way, systemd is not a concern for a majority of the community, at least not yet, because they are happy to continue running older versions of Debian. In short, there is little need of a fork since most people are already running systems that work for them.





Torrent Corner

Weekly Torrents



Bittorrent is a great way to transfer large files, particularly open source operating system images, from one place to another. Most bittorrent clients recover from dropped connections automatically, check the integrity of files and can re-download corrupted bits of data without starting a download over from scratch. These characteristics make bittorrent well suited for distributing open source operating systems, particularly to regions where Internet connections are slow or unstable.



Many Linux and BSD projects offer bittorrent as a download option, partly for the reasons listed above and partly because bittorrent's peer-to-peer nature takes some of the strain off the project's servers. However, some projects do not offer bittorrent as a download option. There can be several reasons for excluding bittorrent as an option. Some projects do not have enough time or volunteers, some may be restricted by their web host provider's terms of service. Whatever the reason, the lack of a bittorrent option puts more strain on a distribution's bandwidth and may prevent some people from downloading their preferred open source operating system.



With this in mind, DistroWatch plans to give back to the open source community by hosting and seeding bittorrent files for distributions that do not offer a bittorrent option themselves. For now, we are hosting a small number of distribution torrents, listed below. The list of torrents offered will be updated each week and we invite readers to e-mail us with suggestions as to which distributions we should be hosting. When you message us, please place the word "Torrent" in the subject line, make sure to include a link to the ISO file you want us to seed and please make sure the project you are recommending does not already host its own torrents. We want to primarily help distributions and users who do not already have a torrent option. To help us maintain and grow this free service, please consider making a donation.



The table below provides a list of torrents we currently host. If you do not currently have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.



Operating System Torrent MD5 checksum Fedora Fedora-Live-Workstation-x86_64-22/Fedora-Workstation-22-x86_64-CHECKSUM 88bc0096752600ca4b8f6a4e88ab761e Peppermint OS Peppermint-6-20150518-amd64.iso 3b8dcaf0123e713fee3dd29aa6d8438c Q4OS q4os-1.2.2-x64.iso f03b4b0b2d973fc9d65b7c07fc68a4af



Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found here. All torrents we make available here are also listed on the very useful Linux Tracker website. Thanks to Linux Tracker we are able to share the following torrent statistics.



Torrent Corner statistics:

Total torrents seeded: 64

Total downloads completed: 38,693

Total data uploaded: 7.1TB

Released Last Week

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll

Fixed releases vs rolling releases



Some of us like to keep up with the latest open source software available. Often the best way to get a steady flow of new software is by running a rolling release distribution. Rolling releases are designed to be installed once and upgraded perpetually, never becoming obsolete. Other people might prefer to install fresh images every six months or so. Projects such as Ubuntu and Fedora offer users stable, yet modern installation images every six months. However, there are also those of us who like to stick with tried and true software, older, conservative distributions that have earned reputations for stability. In this week's poll we would like to know which approach you prefer? Do you like to ride the cutting edge, update frequently or stick with more conservative update plans? Perhaps you take one approach for your desktop machine and another for your servers? Let us know which type of distribution (rolling, fixed or semi-rolling) you prefer or chime in with your thoughts in the comments section.



You can see the results of last week's poll on desktop environments here. Fixed vs Rolling Releases

Full rolling (Arch) Semi-rolling (Chakra) Rapid fixed release (Fedora/Ubuntu) Slow fixed release (Debian/CentOS) Other