Screenfetch of openSUSE Tumbleweed on my web server

But we’ve got Debian!

Like you, I like to run the most up-to-date software on all of my systems, even the ones that I demand reliability from. Don’t get me wrong, I love Debian and use it in the form of Proxmox, but I prefer having my server software as close in versions as possible to my Arch systems.

Update Frequency

One of the main rebuttals to using rolling release distributions is the fact that updates come much faster than might be desired. For my purposes, my development and production environments follow a philosophy of moving as close to upstream as possible to follow the latest developments, bug fixes, and security patches. I feel it’s simpler to keep things up to date to receive these things from upstream rather than backports or patches.

How I Handle Updates

Updates are handled by doing the following:

  1. Run the update command. In the cases for my servers they are either pacman -Syu or zypper dup
  2. Handle potential conflicts and config changes. Either use pacdiff or nvim -d
  3. Run systemctl daemon-reload to handle file-on-disk changes
  4. This is the important step. If important packages and libraries were updated such as the kernel, drivers, or firmware, I fully reboot the system as I sometimes experience weird behavior such as with mounts. Otherwise, I use this command: systemctl soft-reboot to avoid the downtime of a full reboot

By following these steps, I avoid full reboots as fast as possible.