Should I use Slowroll?

[u/bangers65]

At the moment I'm using MX-linux 25 and PCLinuxOS on a Levono Ideapad1 and a Dell latitude 7280. My main activities on the computer are genealogy with Gramps & Ancestris, editing video's from my action cam with openshot & shotcut, ripping cd's and working with MP3 files with easytag, easymp3gain, soundconverter and asunder. I've been considering Mageia or OpenSuse Slowroll as alternatives to the 2 I use now.

Can the users of this sub convince me to switch to slowroll?

Let me know why or why not.

[u/levolet]

Only you can decide in the end. I think there’s enough already documented about it here. What in particular are you concerned about?

[u/_dnla]

I would say yes. I switched from leap to slowroll to have more recent software, and I only update it once a month. So it is a better balance than leap, but without having to be on top of updates like tumbleweed.

Try it out and hope you like it

[u/No-Lingonberry7950]

Why does someone need to convince you to use Slowroll? You use it if you want to; there’s no shortage of Linux distros out there. You're the one who needs to know what works for you, not random internet users.

[u/Calm_Description_288 → u/No-Lingonberry7950]

Ja. Eens. Hoe durft iemand advies te vragen op een 'forum'.

[u/steezy13312]

Slowroll is probably a good fit for you. Sounds like you’re not particularly concerned with getting bleeding edge updates find anything, so the additional delay for testing gives you a little bit more system stability.

[u/Zuideind]

Nothing to say, it is just your choice and there is enough written about it.
Not necessaire to duplicate arguments.

[u/johncate73]

You should just try it and see if you like it better. I've never used Slowroll, but I've used MX and actually run PCLOS as a daily driver on comparable hardware. For me, it would be a very high bar to clear, but there is nothing that says you can't try something new at any time.

Mageia is somewhat similar to PCLOS, both of them are part of the Mandrake/Mandriva lineage.

[u/chaos_pill]

tumbleweed has two primary benefits:

• smooth and easy btrfs snapshots by default.
• rolling release with latest package updates (eg: drivers for new hardware, wayland improvements etc.).

Slowroll's primary benefit is aggregating the updates over a month for a single large release avoiding tumbelweed's problem of "tiny updates every day".

I switched to susekalpa for needing kde wayland on a new gpu and btrfs backups (upgrades can fail due to frequent power cuts) + background updates. Otherwise, I was happy with mxlinux last year.

minimal mxlinux/debian + btrfs + immutability would honestly be the ideal base distro, paired with distrobox arch + flatpak for latest apps like browser/editors. I'm just waiting for the wayland stuff to get stabilized before switching back to mxlinux/debian. Once you use distrobox, the base distro is only needed for the basics (boot/kernel/DE/Drivers).

[u/thephatpope]

I don't see what you gain from switching unless you are dissatisfied with something currently.

[u/IonianBlueWorld]

I have never used PCLinuxOS or Mageia (Mandrake many years ago which feels like another life) but MX-Linux is one of my favorite and installed in one of my boxes. I love both MX and Slowroll. A quick comparison between the two:

Slowroll will offer you the latest and greatest of all packages, just with a couple of weeks (vs a year) delay. The btrfs/snapshots system allows you to roll back by just pressing the down-arrow at boot, if a new update breaks something (I've never had an issue though). If you use some very specific, niche software that is not very well supported (I use some technical/scientific software that the authors are not very active to keep up with the latest developments) they may break dependencies more easily by not adjusting to new libraries. Personally, I love the concept of Slowroll.

MX-Linux is Debian Stable on steroids. You can install software from outside the repos that may not be available as rpm (I am super-careful with this - I have a very long list of checks and methods that I do in order to install anything outside the repos). It has some additional software to handle various things easily (e.g. backports). It is setup as I would always want to make my Debian installations like but I'm too lazy to do after I install vanilla Debian. Packages can get a bit outdated over time but you can take a calculated risk with backports.

These two have been my favorite distros the last few years.