Whenever someone asks for a first linux distro, everyone is very quick to recommend an LTS distro, because LTS has been equated with ease of use. While LTS distros tend to be easy, this has nothing to do with their release schedule, and rolling release distros can have similar ease of use.
Rolling release can be easy
If you have read my post about nixos, you may be aware that I am currently using CachyOS; unlike arch, I did not have to do anything after installing for my nvidia GPU to work, which is just one example of the fact that any distro, regardless of its update schedule, can set things up for you that would otherwise be harder.
LTS can be hard
On a different device of mine, I have mint installed. As I don't use that device as frequently I thought that an LTS distro would be a better option.
Designed around specific use cases
On the mint computer, I realised that I wanted to use KDE plasma instead of cinnamon, the desktop environment itself worked fine, but the default configuration of sddm throws a few errors about configuration, and covers half my screen in a fucking keyboard.
Out of date software
I wanted to install neovim to write some code, easy right? Just run sudo apt install neovim, well that worked, but when I wanted to use Lazyvim I got an error about the version of neovim being too old: apt had installed neovim 0.9.5, which was released at the end of 2023. As someone who has experience with linux and programming, compiling from source wasn't a difficult task, but on a rolling release distribution, the package manager wouldn't have installed a nearly 3 year old version of a package in the first place.
None of this is to say that all LTS distros suck and should never be used, or that we should recommend arch and gentoo to a new linux user, just that we should not always equate LTS with ease of use.
Posted 17/09/26