Ubuntu is a point release distro, meaning that it has multiple releases that you update between. However, there are many people who would instead prefer to have a rolling release distro, where there is one release that gets continually updated. While some people would move to another distro, like Debian Sid, or even Arch Linux, there is a way that you can turn Ubuntu Linux into a rolling release distro. The method that I am going to show you today, it a lot faster than doing it manually, and it entails downloading a shell script which will automatically change you to the ‘devel’ release.
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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word “Linux” in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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What is the use case for doing this compared to just using a different distro with newer packages? Fedora is very nearly as well supported for most software but has newer packages than Ubuntu while also innovating by including newer technologies first. With also Ubuntu pushing Snaps heavily as well makes me question why anybody runs Ubuntu at all anymore when better distros exist.
I agree that Fedora or a proper rolling release would be a better choice, but re: using Ubuntu at all as a desktop user, there’s a few reasons. First of all, its install and setup process is absolutely painless. Fedora for example requires quite a bit of extra things out of the box. dnf isn’t configured very well, additional repositories aren’t enabled, it’s missing a ton of codecs, it won’t handle nvidia drivers automatically (though they’ve made that easier lately), etc. mostly as a result of its free software policy. Ubuntu has no qualms with delivering proprietary software and otherwise putting principles to the side if it makes the process smoother.
In addition to that huge one, the vast majority of answers you’re going to find when looking things up will be catered toward Ubuntu, it’s still common for projects to only provide .debs (though this has been made MUCH better since flatpak and appimage came around), or they might be familiar with it from work.
Depending on your preferred desktop environment they may have the best implementation of it. Ubuntu MATE is to MATE what Fedora is to GNOME, you’re not going to find a MATE experience half as good anywhere else. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same was true for lxqt or something.
I don’t think Ubuntu is one of the better distros and am more likely to nudge people toward Fedora, Debian, or Arch, but there’s definitely valid reasons to use Ubuntu.
I wonder if Fedora having a simple checkbox upon first login to enable RPM fusion, nvidia drivers, and codecs would be considered to be going against its free software policy. They would technically be shipping only free software be default and in their own repos if users only had to check a couple of checkboxes after installation to enable some common non-free software.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that Fedora tries to ship packages that are more vanilla than standard Ubuntu packages. If the experience on Ubuntu MATE is better than the Fedora MATE/Compiz spin, then perhaps that is the fault of both Ubuntu MATE for going against the spirit of free software by not pushing their changes upstream and maybe even the fault of the MATE desktop developers themselves for not trying to request those changes be pushed upstream.
They’ve been working to do just that with the checkboxes, but it’s still kind of half-assed and if you want a full normal experience you’re better off just enabling RPMfusion the normal way.
Re:MATE, I’m actually not sure why the changes haven’t been pushed upstream as the Ubuntu MATE developers have a ton of overlap with the core MATE team. I do know there have been efforts by the Ubuntu MATE devs to nudge other distributions to adopt relevant packages like the Ayatana indicators which were made for Unity and now are used in Ubuntu MATE which have gone ignored.
Regardless, for the end user who prefers MATE, the choice is kinda obvious.
As someone wrote in 2017 at Ubuntu Bug #1728616: using ‘devel’ in sources.list causes apt-get update to fail [via]:
Looking at the issues for “rolling-rhino” it looks like that is still the situation today.