Unfortunately, there are no Debian-based full rolling releases. The various spins that are based off testing or unstable will still experience the freeze that occurs before each Debian release. So if you want to go full rolling, you'll have to learn something new. The major choices include:
* Arch and its derivatives
* Gentoo and its derivatives
* openSUSE Tumbleweed
I dismissed Gentoo because, frankly, on this beast of a laptop I have, the gains that would come from compiling everything would be quickly offset by the time spent, well, compiling. openSUSE is an extremely well-managed distro, but once you go the Tumbleweed route, some of the automation disappears -- for instance, each kernel update requires reinstalling the nVidia blob. Given that I rather like the command line for routine maintenance and wanted to build up an OS that's truly my own, Arch became the natural choice.
Most distros these days follow the Linux Standard Base -- even Debian to a degree, although they never formally signed on. Many of the commands and file locations you already know will still be present. You will have to learn a new packaging system, and that's probably the biggest hurdle that comes with any distro change. If utility of knowledge matters to you, like it does to me, openSUSE could be the better choice -- knowledge of RPM will be broadly useful. But since I'm smitten with full rolling, and don't ever expect to do anything with Fedora or Red Hat, I decided to let that go because Arch's overall collection of pluses carried greater weight.
systemd is proving to be quite easy to wrap my brain around; it's obvious why so many distros have adopted it. Canonical's stubborn insistence on sticking with Upstart, and all the rest of their projects borne from not-invented-here syndrome, makes me think that Ubuntu is losing interesting in being Linux.
* Arch and its derivatives
* Gentoo and its derivatives
* openSUSE Tumbleweed
I dismissed Gentoo because, frankly, on this beast of a laptop I have, the gains that would come from compiling everything would be quickly offset by the time spent, well, compiling. openSUSE is an extremely well-managed distro, but once you go the Tumbleweed route, some of the automation disappears -- for instance, each kernel update requires reinstalling the nVidia blob. Given that I rather like the command line for routine maintenance and wanted to build up an OS that's truly my own, Arch became the natural choice.
Most distros these days follow the Linux Standard Base -- even Debian to a degree, although they never formally signed on. Many of the commands and file locations you already know will still be present. You will have to learn a new packaging system, and that's probably the biggest hurdle that comes with any distro change. If utility of knowledge matters to you, like it does to me, openSUSE could be the better choice -- knowledge of RPM will be broadly useful. But since I'm smitten with full rolling, and don't ever expect to do anything with Fedora or Red Hat, I decided to let that go because Arch's overall collection of pluses carried greater weight.
systemd is proving to be quite easy to wrap my brain around; it's obvious why so many distros have adopted it. Canonical's stubborn insistence on sticking with Upstart, and all the rest of their projects borne from not-invented-here syndrome, makes me think that Ubuntu is losing interesting in being Linux.
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