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Ubuntu Linux

'Rolling Rhino' Tool Converts Ubuntu Into a Rolling Release (neowin.net) 48

Posted by EditorDavid from the rolling-rhinos dept.
"Rolling Rhino is a tool long ago created by Martin Wimpress, who until recently was part of the Canonical team," one Linux blog pointed out recently. "What it does is basically change the repositories of the DailyLive developers...."

Neowin sees it as a competitive advantage. After more than 17 years, there's a way to get a Ubuntu distro offering the same "rolling" release cycles that helped popularize Arch Linux: While there are many positive qualities that would draw a user into the world of Arch, its headlining feature would be the one that remains the most relevant in today's world of continuous integration and delivery and that's its rolling release strategy. While I don't think Judd Vinet could have predicted the proliferation of DevOps or the massive shift to cloud computing, it must be interesting to see that the entire industry is following the Arch strategy in all sorts of different places. One could even argue that Microsoft Windows has become a rolling release.

While many of Arch's contemporaries have joined the fray, one notable open-source giant has yet to make the leap.

Rolling Rhino looks to change that by converting Ubuntu into a rolling release.
Thanks to Slashdot reader segaboy81 for submitting the story...
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'Rolling Rhino' Tool Converts Ubuntu Into a Rolling Release More

'Rolling Rhino' Tool Converts Ubuntu Into a Rolling Release

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  • Wrong title (Score:5, Informative)

    by billyswong ( 1858858 ) on Saturday March 26, 2022 @10:45PM (#62393025)
    It's an "unofficial flavour", not a switch.

    Rolling Rhino Remix is an un-official Ubuntu flavour which converts the Ubuntu operating system into a rolling release Linux distriibution by tracking the devel series.

    • Not only that, but the title includes the FINALLY fanaticism. Bias and opinion are force-fed to us in these headlines. It's like we are being pushed to do something like "update daily" despite this being arguably a bad security practice. Or going to "the cloud"--yeah, find me something with the nine nines of reliability promised actually fulfilled, and find me something not turned to swiss cheese with back doors to the corporations running the cloud services and to the governments issuing the gag orders.
      • "The newly combined company will operate under the name Slashdot Media and will offer market-leading B2B software buying tools, performance marketing & demand generation advertising services, open source software development solutions, and technology comparison engines that will provide unparalleled value to clients and users. Slashdot Media will continue to operate iconic web brands such as SourceForge.net and Slashdot.org, and welcome a portfolio of hugely popular technology and telecommunications com

      • Spot on. Apart from security concerns this is a movement pushed by lazy and incompetent developers (a miniscule fraction of the people involved with applications) who always use the latest and greatest libraries because they have the most up tp date functionality. But the practice is to the detriment of users (the vast majority of people involved in an application) who are forced to update their OS near daily. Not because there is a proper functional motivation, but simply because said developers have ma

        • This leaves me with so many questions.
          Do you understand the concept of multiple code branches?
          A rolling release doesn't necessarily have to be the latest and greatest.
          I don't see why you would equate the two.

          What are these security concerns you mention and how do they differ from a traditional release cycle?
          Do you not want to receive bug fixes in a timely fashion?

          What is it about this that makes devs lazy and incompetent?
          Should I not be more concerned about devs that use buggy and outdated librar

    • So they re-invented debian testing

      • server clustering for example, with to many instances to manage the old way. well, can we call it the systemd effect?

    • I'm shocked: slashdot don't do that /irony ;]

  • Actually test driving Solus in part because of rolling releases (and hopefully never having to re-install the OS again), as well as flatpaks and generally being mild-mannered (only had one freakout and it recovered gracefully)

    And it's managed the incredible trick of keeping the fuck out of the way so I can do other work (remember when OS were meant just to run other programs)

    Get a decent set of GUI utilities to deal with hardware changes and minor system configs and I'm good to go.

  • This news is from 2 years ago https://9to5linux.com/you-can-... [9to5linux.com]

  • "Ubuntu is finaly..." (Score:3)

    by Mozai ( 3547 ) on Sunday March 27, 2022 @12:10AM (#62393127) Homepage
    Did you check to see if "Rolling Rhino Remix" is actually published by Ubuntu's owner Canonical, and not just a side-project by a dude who worked for Canonical? Saying "Ubuntu is making the change" suggests this is an official offering from Canonical. Saying "finally" in there suggests this is the first time Ubuntu's had a rolling-release version, but when I hit up Google to see if Rolling Rhino is endorsed by Canonical or Ubuntu, savoury1's project [github.io] from more than three years ago was the first result.

  • But for servers - which is where Linux actually holds a major chunk of the market - rolling release is exactly the opposite of what you want.

    • Totally agree, but even on desktop, I don't want bleeding edge, I want it to work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bigbutt ( 65939 )

      For servers I must have a consistent build between the environments to make sure when it's time to patch production, all the updates have been thoroughly tested. I'm running a RHEL based site and have a Katello server up to manage patches. I create a content view and move that patch snapshot through the environments.

      [John]

  • Rolling releases suck. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Sunday March 27, 2022 @12:18AM (#62393137) Homepage
    There is never a target version, anything can change, the only reason so much software uses rolling releases is because they never manage to actually fix anything. Having an official released version is hard because it takes effort, agreement within the team, and self control.

    • Honestly, with the rise of these open source terrorist attacks, currently in the JS community, rolling release really seems like it is on the way out to me.

  • I was curious to see how Ubuntu was going to approach a more rolling release strategy with *some* stability. Most approaches I've seen are just like what this project does - you are on dev always -that doesn't count as a "release" to me.

    Currently Ubuntu has:
    LTS releases - what most people use, cloud images are this, etc. Every 2 years.
    "RR" regular releases - every 6 months, supported for 9 and generally thoughts of as a stepping stone to the next LTS.
    Development, what will become the next release.

    5 year

    • The article is bullshit anyway, the rolling rhino was rolling for two years already, just a matter of tracking dev, and this isn't official Ubuntu release.

      No sane person wants to track dev for either a production environment or a desktop where serious work needs to be done. "Bleeding edge" is a juvenile hobby unless you're involved in building the bleeding edge (very small percent of users)

  • Thats great! (Score:3)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Sunday March 27, 2022 @01:03AM (#62393173)
    Take an already flakey distro and make it even more unstable than it was before

  • I started out with Mandrake, then moved to Arch. Mandrake did what I call "big bang" updates, where a lot of packages change at the same time. One problem with that, for work use, is that you could end up with an unusable system for days, while you fixed various issues. With Arch, you could still get breakages, but they were not so extensive, so you usually had a working system all the time. With rolling updates, you had a lot of small pains, instead of one big pain.

    I am currently running a work laptop with

    • One problem with that, for work use, is that you could end up with an unusable system for days, while you fixed various issues.

      That's not a problem, that's a very useful feature, one that allows for testing and staging on your own terms, your own timeline and when you're satisfied with the upgrade it's easy to make a switch.

      Rolling releases are horrible in production environments.

      • You make a good point there. In order to make it work, you need to have a testing system on which you do the updates, in parallel with the current production system, which keeps working. As I have mentioned, I have done this kind of dual system upgrade, to avoid holdups while problems are addressed. If you want to do it formally, you have a test plan to make sure the testing system is fully operational, before swapping to the new system.

        I think part of the preference for rolling updates was my former collea

  • This is such a pathetic post (Score:3)

    by LazLong ( 757 ) on Sunday March 27, 2022 @02:33AM (#62393237)

    'EditorDavid' is either an idiot, didn't investigate this story, doesn't know shit about Ubuntu and Linux in general, or all of the preceding.

    A real waste of a post.

    • didn't investigate this story

      Editors don't even investigate the spelling in the submissions or if its a dupe. What makes you think EditorDavid ever reads the story?

  • First, Rolling Rhino has been around for over two years.
    Second, this is just tracking the development repositories
    Third, LTS (and even "normal" releases) are way more stable than development versions.
    Fourth, writing "finally" in the title just reflects the author's desires and not the desire of the majority of Ubuntu users.

  • For server-side, where Ubuntu still matters that would make very little sense. And since their desktop doesn't matter anymore from the time they reintroduced the g-word for DE, why bother?

  • Rolling releases are exactly what you do not want in a production environment. Systems need to be stable, and have predictable update rates which can be managed with flexible timing and minimal fuss.

    I play around with various distros, on systems which are not important for my day to day tasks. But on anything which has to be up and running when I need it, and not after I spent a chunk of effort fixing some breakage, I run release based. It is much less important that the packages are the very newest of the

  • Wow (Score:2)

    by skogs ( 628589 )

    Somebody that works there finally got pissed off after having his entire machine blown away every 6 months? Say it isn't so.

  • Story is proof that Arch Linux fanbois are fanbois.

  • It really sounds about exactly the same as running Debian Sid or Fedora Rawhide, is an unofficial spin.

    Nothing to see here . . .

  • 3 hits - out.

    Rolling releases for operating systems are just more frequent updates - which does mean the potential for more frequent ... issues.

    Continuous delivery for a website is one thing, but for an entire operating system? - yeah, well, that's probably not something I would want to use.

    Sure, it's great if you like the cutting edge - if your hobby or job are linked to that, but if you want reliability, predictability and stability, you stick with tried and tested point releases. You update when there's

  • I'm quite sure that Debian has always had this with Unstable -> Testing -> Stable. Then about every 2 years Stable is put into a "release" where it's maintained for a while.
    I'm not sure why people think this is such a revolutionary idea

  • Which is why I, along with a *lot* of others, abandoned CentOS. I DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, WANT MY SYSTEM UPDATED DAILY.

    What that means is your system is now unstable, since it included fixes checked in yesterday that break something checked in the day before. It means they haven't spend the time to regression test.

    Which is great, when it means that everyone using the daily update has just become an alpha tester, for free.

    Hell, no.

    • You seem somewhat confused about this. CentOS Stream essentially works like an Ubuntu stable release - updates are released when they pass QA. It's not like you install CentOS Stream 9 and it incrementally transforms itself into CentOS Stream 10.

      So what do you use? Another RHEL rebuild? I guess SUSE Enterprise might work, but I'm not sure how things happen there. And Debian is a weird in between place in that it does have the point releases but then they replace the existing stable repository on a flag day,

      • The 2nd version missed a bit of the original edit that got lost due to technical limitations...

        updates (bugfixes, security, ocassional backports) are released when they pass QA

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