First of all, many rolling release distros don’t follow upstream as fast as possible—there’s often some testing window.
People go on and on about backported security patches and stability, but I’ve had to handle so many buggy patches or issues that never got a backported fix that I now think this is basically a fantasy. The distro maintainers just don’t have the time (or experience with all the software they ship!) to backport patches for every single issue. I’d really rather get a fix by the actual software maintainer than a year-old mystery meat version that still has a bunch of known non security bugs fixed in upstream that the distro maintainers don’t care about.
Even worse, being able to stay on essentially outdated software puts a lot of organizations into a tough spot when their LTS version finally becomes unsupported. Practice makes perfect, and I think lots of small, regular updates result in a lot less pain than a mega-update every few years (really: I’ve had to manage one of these more than once, and it’s a total nightmare figuring out which of 1000 changes in the new LTS version caused a performance regression or something).
People go on and on about backported security patches and stability, but I’ve had to handle so many buggy patches or issues that never got a backported fix that I now think this is basically a fantasy. The distro maintainers just don’t have the time (or experience with all the software they ship!) to backport patches for every single issue. I’d really rather get a fix by the actual software maintainer than a year-old mystery meat version that still has a bunch of known non security bugs fixed in upstream that the distro maintainers don’t care about.
Even worse, being able to stay on essentially outdated software puts a lot of organizations into a tough spot when their LTS version finally becomes unsupported. Practice makes perfect, and I think lots of small, regular updates result in a lot less pain than a mega-update every few years (really: I’ve had to manage one of these more than once, and it’s a total nightmare figuring out which of 1000 changes in the new LTS version caused a performance regression or something).