So, I am going to take a different perspective and tell you something you probably don’t want to hear. For most business use cases, a broad rollout of a rolling distro is a terrible idea. There are a bunch of reasons for this:
- On a rolling distro you are often forced to upgrade applications. This may cause problems in a business environment, either because you need to hold software back or because the lack of predictability around it will frustrate your user base.
- In some cases, applications just plain don’t work on Arch/Tumbleweed because it takes time for the application developers to catch up with the new libraries
- Support isn’t only about being able to call someone for help. It is about 3rd party application makers being willing to support you. Many business applications are only supported on SUSE Enterprise, Redhat and Ubuntu. Often even those who support SUSE won’t support OpenSUSE leap and almost nobody supports tumbleweed.
- While it may be easier for you, personally, to maintain a rolling distro, it isn’t easier to manage for an entire business. It introduces way too many variables.
My advice is to start by assessing which applications your business needs/wants to run. Then evaluate the risk and support lifecycle with each application.
For me, there are only a handful of desktop distros I would consider running in mid-size or larger business environment.
The ones with big corporate support:
- RedHat
- SUSE Enterprise
- Ubuntu
Free derivatives of those with broad support:
- Fedora
- OpenSUSE Leap
Of course, it all depends on what applications your organization needs to run and the tolerances of your user base but hopefully this helps a little.