Example: Fedora Rawhide, Ubuntu Latest, Debian Stable
Holy smokes people are mad at this thread. I genuinely don’t know why. It’s a valid and good question to have.
Here’s something to get started, although I don’t use any of these so take it with a grain of salt:
- Fedora LTS: Approximately 6 months.
- openSUSE Leap: Approximately 8 months
- Linux Mint LTS: 2 years
- Ubuntu LTS: 2 years
- Debian: Approximately 2-3 years
- RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux): Approximately 3-5 years.
- SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE): Approximately 3-5 years
Damn, federation is crazy. Over here you’re the only comment lol.
If you open up the host instance, you’ll only see one other commenter anyway so I think they are down voting due to it seeming like a demand, but since no one’s messaging why I’m just guessing
Here too. Weird.
I think it’d also be good to document:
Alpine and NixOS: both 6 months
Minor releases of RHEL: 6 months
Non LTS Ubuntu: 6 months
The question also brings up Fedora rawhide. Fedora rawhide never has releases, though its version is always the current latest branched release (not necessarily stable/beta/alpha) + 1.
Since the pace of development was also brought up:
Fedora Rawhide and ELN (same package set) -> Fedora Stable after ~2-3 months of being “stabilized” (this stabilization period has periodic “freezes” which is why bad versions of XZ never made it into Fedora 40’s beta)
Fedora Rawhide and ELN (same package set) -> CentOS Stream (currently unclear how long it takes to go from branched to full release, though it was branched months ago from ELN) -> RHEL every 6 months
AlmaLinux releases are tagged from CentOS stream every 6 months, and patched with security updates. When a new version releases, the current minor release is immediately EOL’d, unlike RHEL. Rocky is the same. Both have extra support services from third parties. RHEL offers EUS releases for every other minor release (as of RHEL 9).
It’s a common misconception that Fedora stable releases become CentOS Stream releases. This pattern was true pre-CentOS stream, but now, for the most part, CentOS Stream and Fedora stable might share a few patches at most, but their development timelines are different. They branch directly off the rolling Fedora Rawhide/ELN trunk.
Debian unstable -> Debian testing (auto-promoted after 2 weeks iirc) -> Ubuntu stable or Debian stable
Nobody is mad at this thread. My reply has valid points and is trying to help the guy asking this question. The question can’t be answered in a straightforward manner as he wants it to be. Therefore I recommend him to specify some things, so we can help him better find the right distribution.
I recommend to learn what a rolling release, a LTS, the difference between stable and unstable are. In example LTS means holding back lot of packages, but the minor or security updates might be quick. Feature updates are often slower, but that does not mean the updates on the distribution are slow. Let’s take distributions with KDE in example. Some are still on version 5, because of LTS, but the updates might be quick. Others might have a newer version of KDE 6, but the updates itself might be often lagging behind official releases, because they have to make lot of changes.
Therefore its important to specify what he wants to find, so we can help him better. Not mad, just trying to help. Don’t make this awkward.
IIRC Beehaw doesn’t federate downvotes. The OP has been pretty heavily downvoted for no valid reason
Does this list include rolling release distros like Arch? Because I can see no mention of it
Such a list makes no sense. What do you try to find out, its better to ask in a normal way instead like asking ChatGPT question phrases. What is your goal? Does it include Gaming in example? You should learn what stable vs unstable means, what LTS stands for and what a rolling release is. Some distributions follow a fixed release cycle, but that does not mean they update everything in the system. So is it slow or fast? There are so much nuances to this. Maybe this list helps you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions
I dont have a list, but I usually use this site. It also does not only show Linux distributions, but also software products like nginx, mariadb or programming languages like go, rust and python.
Edit: Some Linux distributions habe older software, which they support with security updates and also stay on one kernel version. Fedora as example gives you a new kernel after few weeks. Maybe you can be more concrete
Not true about Rawhide. It’s a testing environment for maintainers and developers. And it often has many outdated packages.
