I have always had far fewer problems on rolling release distros. I have an Arch install I had since 2017, and it never broke. Every time I did a dist-upgrade on an LTS distro it caused major problems.
Granted, you have to know what you are doing and not just copy-paste random shell commands from the internet, but if you do, I would argue rolling releases are easier to maintain. You get breaking chances piecemeal as they happen, instead of all at once every two years.
Also, I think this question, posed by the author, is very pertinent:
> At what point does an LTS branch become a continuously rebased downstream fork rather than a stable release?
I have always had far fewer problems on rolling release distros. I have an Arch install I had since 2017, and it never broke. Every time I did a dist-upgrade on an LTS distro it caused major problems.
Granted, you have to know what you are doing and not just copy-paste random shell commands from the internet, but if you do, I would argue rolling releases are easier to maintain. You get breaking chances piecemeal as they happen, instead of all at once every two years.
Also, I think this question, posed by the author, is very pertinent:
> At what point does an LTS branch become a continuously rebased downstream fork rather than a stable release?