Requirements:
- Must be more user friendly than LFS
- Must not be in the RHEL/IBM family/stream or derivative
- Must not be SLES or derivative
- Does not make you install a desktop environment
- Must have steam
Hopes
- Rolling release
- Has a package manager of some sort
- Doesn’t require manual intervention every six months
- Maintainers aren’t psycho
Debian. Set it to stable instead of trixie and it’s kind of a rolling release. Testing if you want newer versions. You won’t get breakage unless you use sid.
Does that have issues? Part of the reason I’m looking for a rolling release is way back in the late 2000’s, you could upgrade Ubuntu but things always broke and so you might as well reinstall
I’ve not had issues doing distro upgrades in a long time, and I mess with my systems a lot. There’s been a lot of progress in 15+ years, and Debian is usually pretty good about keeping stuff working.
I suppose if time has indeed passed by 15 years I could give it another shot. I’m moving my mail server from bookworm to trixie by… getting another VPS, testing out configs against trixie, then switching over
Testing or Unstable would be kind of like a rolling release.
Stable currently is Trixie, and has a release cycle of roughly 1-2 years. It’s not a rolling release. (However, OP’s comments make it seem like they’re just trying to avoid major breakage during release upgrades, in which case Debian Stable might still be a good pick so long as they read the release notes before upgrading.)