.If, in your usage scenario, there's"no need"... well that's great.
In my usage, I've grown weary dodging gnome/polkit dependencies, GTK3 dependencies, systemd dependencies, etc. in the course of maintaining up-to-date versions of my preferred applications. Whatever else I might type here, in order to explain/justify my earlier post, has probably already been ranted about in articles+comments here:

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nadir wrote:9 years of Linux and 20 years of the BSD-clone Mac and still not able to use the command line? Just wow.

I had a long reply typed to this, then looked down below the window to the posts that had been on the following page when I hit"reply" and deleted it all -- because it was about to cross the line. I'll just say that you, nadir, are entitled to your opinion, but it's not contributing to my question. Others here have done so, and stayed much further away from saying I don't belong in their Linux world because I'm not willing to spend hundreds of hours trying to understand man pages that might as well have been translated from Hindi to Mandarin to Japanese to English.

I'm not interested in Sid -- hell, I'm getting away from testing because it isn't reliable in terms of getting my required tasks done. Leave it at that.

yep, unsurprisingly this thread drifted from the wide-open OP."stable rolling with wine and based on Debian, or maybe not..."

not quite deja vu, but close:
post31556.html#p31556

First, I want a rolling distribution (which, with Debian, pretty much means using testing repos, which seems to mean having a lot of stuff not quite work for a period... There seems a veritable paucity of rolling distros based on Debian

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trimmed away the tail-end part "based on Debian -- what else else should I be looking at".
You're seeking Debian-based, or you're not. How 'bout start from there.

Supposing you limit choices to debian-based... you want rolling, but it must be"stable rolling", preferably with wine installed.
Although"stable rolling" seems like an oxymoronic phrase, your stated goal is fairly clear.

Perhaps the most limiting factor is the preference/requirement for the distro to contain preinstalled wine.
If you can forego that requirement, the distro selection shortlist won't be quite as short.

Ah, KDE preinstalled... the plot thickens.

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SolydK
Makulu
Netrunner OS
Metamorphose Linux

Really, the distrowatch search page (based on Debian testing) does provide a reasonable starting point for quickly whittling a shortlist.
From there, following links to user forums to read/note how much, or how often, breakage is being reported should prove enlightening.

skidoo wrote:Really, the distrowatch search page (based on Debian testing) does provide a reasonable starting point for quickly whittling a shortlist.
From there, following links to user forums to read/note how much, or how often, breakage is being reported should prove enlightening.

Yes, I had gone fishing on Distrowatch before posting my question here and on the Mepis forums. I'd looked at a short list including SolydK (I've got the ISO stored, but don't have a CD -- as I recall, it won't fit on a CD), something from Brazil which name escapes me at the moment, and not much else, though I was originally looking only at 64-bit so my list was a bit shorter than yours. I don't insist on preinstalled Wine, I just need to be able to install and use a pretty current Wine because one of my Windows games was broken from 1.6 until 1.7.17 (and I'm not up to building it from source), and Pipelight (one of the major points of this quest is to be able to use a single browser that can handle both Java and Flash -- something that doesn't exist in the native Linux world at present, given that Flash 11.2 is dead as far as content providers are concerned; it's more a matter of luck than intent if Flash content works with the Linux native Flash player -- and Pipelight plus Windows Flash Player will solve that problem).

I've pretty much concluded based on other suggestions and research based on those pointers, that Kubuntu will do what I need. It's not rolling, but Ubuntu derivatives offer a genuine upgrade that reportedly has worked well for several years (since at least 10.04 > 12.04, also reported to work well from 12.04 and 13.10 to 14.04), which fulfills my base desire not to have to install from scratch, i.e. start over with the whole"getting the distro to boot successfully" problem before even starting to learn the new system, every couple years, and 14.04 is LTS, meaning I won't strictly have to even upgrade until April 2019 -- at which time my system will be close to ten year old and I might well be ready to upgrade my hardware.

Now, the challenge is getting Kubuntu to boot on a system that's been running Mepis (originally 32-bit, currently 64-bit) daily for over a year and occasionally for a year before that, and antiX 13.2 64-bit on multi-boot for a couple months. Every time I start it, whether direct from Grub Legacy or by chainloading Grub 2 that the Kubuntu installer set up, I get a kernel panic in less than 1.5 seconds. I'm working on that with some help from folks at the Mepis forum, since the Kubuntu forum doesn't seem to have help with either the knowledge to solve this problem, or the time to work with me.

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Well, nadir's idea of humor notwithstanding (all I had to do was ask a question that someone knew how to answer, and they're as helpful as folks here or on the Mepis forum -- in fact, there's a good bit of overlap), I've now got Kubuntu 14.04 up and running, and I'm about 60% through installing my applications and customizing -- I think I can make it look almost the same as Mepis and it already acts very similar (with a few little tweaks) -- and yes, it does do what I asked for, i.e. everything Mepis did, only with more up to date packages that can handle current needs, and with upgrades offered instead of a clean install from scratch at end of life (which I didn't know was available when I started my search; it satisfies my needs as well as rolling with, apparently, a much lower incidence of stuff breaking after updates).

I've already got Pipelight installed (still tweaking to get the 32-bit nVidia drivers on the Linux side to cooperate with 32-bit Windows Flash provided by Pipelight), SeaMonkey up and running and sharing bookmarks, etc. with the one in Mepis (still have to configure my e-mail), and today's project, if I have time, is to get Wine installed and set up the Windows applications I run that way (one of which is a bit of a process).