I’m very much in favour of stable releases. Ideally, more stable than Debian, i.e. without breaking Firefox in the middle of a release cycle.
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I’m guessing you’re talking more stable than Debian’s testing branch? There aren’t many things more stable than Debian’s stable branch. If you are looking for more stable than Debian Stable the research I’ve done so far says OpenBSD may be the best option but I haven’t actually made that plunge on my server due to my current preference of Plex as a media server.
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I prefer this rolling release. What drove me away from Debian was that Stable was getting too stale with user applications, but I was worried about using Testing because I hear it doesn’t receive security updates in a timely manner. Ubuntu’s short term release or whatever their rolling is called, covers up for the security aspect but I never wanted to go for that due to the usual beef FOSS people have with Canonical. I would also like to mention that while I can handle my commands in the terminal, I do not consider myself a power user and I need to Google (jk ofc, more like DDG) any issue I encounter. PureOS offered me the only rolling release that I can rely on. I would hate if it became a yearly release (let alone every 5ish years like Debian) as that would make PureOS unusable and would leave me in the limbo of Debian Testing 
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In light of some of the other contributions to this thread, I think I’d like to revise my previous answer (stable, with some circumstantial exceptions) to something like “That depends on what you mean by a rolling release and a stable release. My gut says stable, but ideally both should be an option.”
Regarding @crisoagf’s dust settlement analogy, I think I prefer if dust is kicked up infrequently in larger amounts rather than little and often. If I know there is going to be a lot of dust, then I can put dust sheets over the furniture, wear a dust mask and open the windows. Then I can run the vacuum cleaner around afterwards. It won’t be a huge deal, because I can prepare myself.
But if there is constantly a small amount of dust being released, then dealing with it is going to place a constant, low-level demand on my attention, which could become quite tiresome.
However, I can understand that other people might find it easier to deal with a small amount of dust on a more regular basis.
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I guess especially the “ordinary” people that Purism also tries to target. They might be used to do some vacuuming every week, but don’t necessarily own a dust mask… 
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I like the idea, even though I don’t really know what you’re talking about… currently not enough time for research.
Some of those ideas remind me of Guix however, which I hope will be usable for ordinary people sooner rather than later and may not have the same RAM requirements as SilverBlue… if someone could share some experiences, I’d be interested.
I’ve been using Xubuntu LTS in recent years and can confirm that upgrading isn’t always straight-forward (one software requires the latest LTS version, the other one the version before that), so if there’s a rolling release model that avoids all that dust without breaking if I do my regular updates, I’d be happy to switch.
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I spent two weeks with SilverBlue. I’m learning about GUIX in a VM now and intend to try it out as my main for two weeks, so I can compare.
Lots of things rubbed me wrong about SB though I do believe in the concept[quote=“cgelinek, post:46, topic:6536, full:true”]
I like the idea, even though I don’t really know what you’re talking about… currently not enough time for research.
Some of those ideas remind me of Guix however, which I hope will be usable for ordinary people sooner rather than later and may not have the same RAM requirements as SilverBlue… if someone could share some experiences, I’d be interested.
I’ve been using Xubuntu LTS in recent years and can confirm that upgrading isn’t always straight-forward (one software requires the latest LTS version, the other one the version before that), so if there’s a rolling release model that avoids all that dust without breaking if I do my regular updates, I’d be happy to switch.
[/quote]
. I should write about my experiences somewhere…
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I’d be interested to read them, but more so on your Guix experiences…
That’d be awesome. Please let me know, you’ve got at least one reader 
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Again, great you surprised me by already targeting transitioning to advances like atomic and reproducable package installs.
Concerning Guix, I found that with guix v1.0.1 installing the system definition generated by the installer worked well in a VM.
About everything concerning system management feels new of course, compared to a traditional distro. Most basically, installing a package with guix install only installs for the current user, a system wide install needs editing of the system configuration (scheme language file) and then a guix system reconfigure config.scm
A nice overview: https://ambrevar.xyz/guix-advance/
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absolutely stable version.
I am now just over 20 years old using Linux and have gone through almost all distributions and versions, stable testing and unstable. By now I have been at Debian for about 5 years, a stable version with only main source. I don’t need to have the last package out if it causes system instability. I need the system to be solid and timely updated for security.
Greetings.
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There is a fact that I do not understand: can’t you use the same source system used by linux? a stable branch and a testing branch. Everyone could decide what to do.
If I look at what’s in the Librem5 image with Qemu in /etc/apt/sources.list I find debian with main. So why not use the same system?
regards
Tree rolling branches would be nice.
First branch - For all who want to help finding issues and bugs.
Second branch - For all who want to get new software early.
Third branch - Security updates only. For all who do not want changes when they have no time to take care of it. Synchronization to second branch every half year or when the user wants to do it.
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Given past experiences with IPhone updates and knowing of some poor Windows updates, I could see problems with rolling updates. I would qualify this by noting that some distros have provided a hold of prior operations left available with some provision to reboot and to select the last functioning update restored. I am not sure as to whether Snapper is enabled or capable of being enabled under PureOS or if this could be added to the distro for revision and rollback to an earlier functionality. If provision for this could be set and if some ‘hotkey’ could be implemented to simplify access to Snapper, this might allow safer rolling function.
Could Timeshift function in PureOS?
Sure that’s one aspect included by the new package builders and managers (nixos and gnu guix https://ambrevar.xyz/guix-advance/ ), even by default:
But it’s actually possible to have different individual package versions installed in parallel on the running system, including their dependencies, and even execute the software in parallel and roll things back and forth as needed.
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The answer is really: Whatever is best and easiest for the casual user. What I want is a linux laptop that I can recommend to anyone regardless of their technical skill.
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There is a very good comment mentioning that guix already supports importing package definitions from pypi etc. (programming language library packagers) and nix packages, so importing or building from debian package definitions might be a real option.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16487133
It’s a comment to a good problem description from Joey Hess about classic package managers (and maintainers) systemically not being able to keep up with the increasing amount and culture of language specific package managers. https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/futures_of_distributions/)
Such a device would probably be on a default “stable” or --preferably named-- time tested (curated) package channel, that gets continuous, conservative package updates (thus it’s not like debian-stable, due to e.g. constant browser updates as long as there are no disrupting UI changes), and gets occasionally scheduled whole-channel feature updates for which larger UI and UX changes are allowed.
Together with a GUI that allows to easily install some packages from a testing and experimental package channel, and that also allows easy pinning of a specific version, to prevent or undo certain package updates (keep using an older version as default version).
Note that it’s a major feature of the nix and guix package managers that it is no longer a problem to provide and install different versions of the same package dependencies (libraries etc.) in the same channel and on the same system.
The QEMU instance you’re likely using is the phone instance. It won’t work on the laptops because it has a different kernel and device tree. But the main body of software is the same.
How to manage ruby and python packages in a robust and reproducable way with the GNU Guix package manager: