OSNews

The idea of rolling releases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_release is brought up on Linux forums quite often, so it seems suitable to discuss it here too. What are the pros and cons of various rolling release Linux distros (or other OS's) when compared to each other, or to distros using traditional releases? Are there some mixed models; or what could be improved in the rolling release implementations?

At least in theory it could be ideal if you needed to install the OS only once and then update software gradually in a rolling release manner, getting also important feature updates besides of only bug fixes. The price: stability problems are typical problems of rolling release distros.

Anyway, upgrading or reinstalling your whole OS every six months or so is often a time-consuming and frustrating process at the time. You often need to reinstall and reconfigure lots of software etc.

There seems to be no option to edit your comment titles although editing the comment text is possible (fixing typos etc.). I wonder if editing titles could be added too? Or would it break comment threads if comment titles were changed too often? Editing titles would be useful if you mistyped a word, for example (I know, I know - proof reading your comment before pressing the submit button would be even more useful, though...).

There are many interesting new alternative operating systems: Syllable, Haiku etc. They may promise speed, low system requirements and many good and promising features. However, I've been hoping that also the security of these new operating systems would be discussed more.

On the age of Internet can we even imagine a desktop operating system without also a connection to the Internet? With networking comes the need for security.

Although there may be no problem now and although developers may see many more urgent goals, the potential threats of future should be considered too. I think the history of old MS Windows versions at least up to Windows ME shows that network security cannot be easily added into the OS as an afterthought but it should be thought about and build into the OS right from the start.

Here's an idea, maybe not of huge importance but might be useful sometimes.

On the OSnews "Submit News" page you can see suggested news by others. Why not give links there too? Sometimes, when I've submitted news, I've noticed there an interesting news article submitted by others. Usually the submitted news are so new that search engines like Google haven't yet indexed them and thus cannot find them if I try.

On the other hand, I could see one major headache and problem: spam and advertisements... The amount of spam in the submitted news might increase? But maybe that would not be an enormous problem after all?

(By the way, a submitted news article today that I might be interested in reading too, is "Accidental in-depth analysis of Ruby on Rails shortcomings". Does anyone know the link to that one?)