You Can Now Transform Ubuntu into a Rolling Release with "Rolling Rhino"

If you ever wanted Ubuntu to be a rolling release, now there’s a tool called Rolling Rhino that lets you do exactly that.

Meet Rolling Rhino, a command-line tool created by Canonical’s Ubuntu Desktop head Martin Wimpress that lets you convert a normal Ubuntu Linux release into a rolling release.

It sounds great, isn’t it? Well, it is if you don’t want to upgrade your Ubuntu system every time a new release is out. But there’s a catch.

Once you’ve converted your Ubuntu system into a rolling release, it will track only the “devel” (read: unstable) repositories instead of the “stable” ones.

This means you’ll have to deal with a whole lot of things like migrating your PPAs if you have any, cleaning obsolete or orphaned packages, since the “devel” repositories contains different, newer package versions than those available in the “stable” ones, as well as to fix any issues that may occur from using the unstable repos.

So, as you can imagine, this isn’t for the faint of heart. Rolling Rhino was created for experienced Ubuntu users and developers who are tired of upgrading to a newer Ubuntu release and only want to have a continuous experience on their desktop machines with access to newer packages, always.

The great thing about Rolling Rhino is that it works with all official Ubuntu flavors, not only the Ubuntu Desktop. These include Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Budgie and Ubuntu Kylin. However, it doesn’t support LTS releases like Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and it’s definitely not recommended for servers.

So, if you’re interested in transforming your Ubuntu system into a rolling release, go ahead and download the Rolling Rhino from its GitHub page or simply clone it on your system using the following command.

git clone https://github.com/wimpysworld/rolling-rhino.git

Once you’ve downloaded Rolling Rhino, you can easily convert your Ubuntu system into a rolling release by executing the sudo ./rolling-rhino command in the Terminal app.

Just keep in mind that there’s no turning back once you’ve converted to a rolling release!

Meanwhile, do check out the screenshots below if you want to see it in action and watch Martin Wimpress creating the magic.