[mananaysiempre]

My point when I mentioned rolling-release was that I’m very unsure whether they need Enterprise Linux and a bout of desperate firefighting every several years or a rolling-release distro and a small but respected team with a staging environment and a steady supply of handheld fire extinguishers.

I could be convinced the former were the answer in many cases, but I’ve never seen the argument for that move beyond a bare proclamation like you’ve just made. It may also be that the argument for this is so mired in the particulars of a situation that it essentially can’t be articulated, but for me that’s mutually exclusive with it applying to a broad, vaguely defined classes of deployments like you’ve just done. (A complex argument is bound to produce an intricately shaped class.)

My (admittedly theoretical) fear in my initial comment was that the LTS people read about kernel updates every month, think of the breakage their LTS encounters on every kernel update, and nope out. Yet without the humongous pile of backported patches the LTS requires kernel updates are the most benign thing in the world if you can afford the reboots—a decade of them with literally not a single issue can and does happen.

[freedude]

"I’ve never seen the argument for that move beyond a bare proclamation like you’ve just made."

Do you work in an industry that requires a specific service level to be maintained? How many hours per day? What does downtime cost? What does redundancy cost?

We have situations that cost millions of dollars per hour when downtime occurs. Now how do you protect those systems?

A definition of Hubris is not believing something exists because you haven't seen it before.

Our tasks as Systems Administrators is not to make a career out of updating systems for maintenance patches. Our task is to design systems to minimize updates and then redesign systems to eliminate wasted user interaction and downtime.