I really like Tumbleweed.
I've been running it on laptops and desktops for over 10 years without much problems.
There are a couple of minor annoyances, like the way it handles patterns, or the way it sometimes updates large swaths of packages when libc is updated, but it's overall rock-solid, does not get in the way, and snapper makes it a breathe to rollback if anything wrong happens.
Really an underrated distro, backed by a small but really knowledgeable and welcoming community.
> Patterns include a list of software packages to install. (...) Patterns define a type of functionality the system should have. They do this by either directly naming required packages, by grouping of sub-patterns, or a combination thereof.
What do you find annoying about them in Thumbleweed?
There are several threads on r/openSUSE about updates reinstalling packages people had previously uninstalled or unselected during installation, because they were part of an installed pattern. Stuff like small games for example. You can manually "taboo" packages to prevent this but it does not sound super convenient.
I only tried Tumbleweed for a couple of days a few weeks back because I needed to switch distros, and this was the only thing that seemed a bit annoying. Other than that it seemed like a solid and friendly distro.
The default way zypper (the package manager) updates installed patterns is to include every recommended package in the pattern.
For example, if you update the pattern "gnome", it will by default reinstall cheese, even if you uninstalled it before.
Thankfully, they thought about this and there is a flag you can use (--no-recommends) to avoid reinstalling all recommended packages.
It really is a minor annoyance, but I understand it could be annoying for new and inexperienced users.
More often than not my Tumbleweed installations broke after receiving broken packages via almost daily rolling updates, so I've switched to a more stable distribution. It was just too much hassle with the constant stream of updates. I've got the feeling that Suse is field-testing package builds from their OBS and is relying on users reporting broken software.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed should be renamed to OpenSuse Testing.
The problem is that I can't (or don't know how to) separate security-relevant updates from the rest.
And I have to admit, I'm the kind of person who is nearly incapable of ignoring a ringing phone; the permanent presence of that little icon in my systray that tells me there are updates available is not that easy for me to ignore. :-/
It's not a huge problem for me, all things considered, so I didn't have the motivation so far to look further into that. On Leap, you can choose to just install security updates, which is nice.
Many projects either don't offer packages for it, or you need to use the in-distro package, which are certainly out of date.
In addition to Zypper being dog slow.
Lack of packages is my main concern. Plenty of software provide their own deb's, which lets me (mostly) get away with running Debian Stable. Does Suse have something like AUR?
I would assume that Suse maintains their own Docker packages. I rely on Docker's repo since I currently run Debian stable, whose docker packages are way too old. I would imagine Tumbleweed doesn't have this issue. One of the reasons I'm looking at switching to podman is to avoid being reliant on third party repos.
They do have docker in their repos, its just not the latest version.
Its the same thing with podman, you are going to be stuck with old versions, and I would say its much more important to have the latest version of podman than docker, as its very actively developed, especially when it comes to compatibility with docker compose.
Yeah but the speed of these repo refreshes is slow af.
On Ubuntu/Debian I get 20MB/s, on Zypper I barely get .5mb/s
DNF is slow too, not because the CDN is slow, but because it sucks at choosing mirrors, limiting to specific countries fixes the issue, that doesnt seem possible with SUSE, or rather it doesn't seem to solve it.
(Context: I run Tumbleweed on two desktop machines)
With Tumbleweed you have much more up-to-date packages than with Debian stable. Probably even more than Debian testing a lot of the time. I initially tried it because I had bought a laptop that Debian wouldn't even install on for some reason, so I think it's fair to say support for very recent hardware should be better on Tumbleweed.
The downside is - to me, at least, that there are frequently large batches of updates (hundreds of packages) that take relatively long to install, make reboots (or at least a logout-login for your desktop session) necessary, and on occasion break something. If you have an nVidia GPU (like I do, sigh), every now and then the kernel will be so recent they haven't updated their drivers, causing Xorg to fail.
When something breaks, thanks to btrfs and snapper, one can roll back to the most recent working state, and for me at least, trying again a few days later tended to work again[1]. But it is more "exciting" than life on Debian stable. ;-) On the recent article about OpenSUSE Leap, one user commented they switched from Tumbleweed to Manjaro (an Arch-based distro) which offers many of the same benefits but has worked better for them.
There are differences between Debian and OpenSUSE in general, which I'm not sure I'm the most qualified person to discuss.
Last but not least, the community on the OpenSUSE support forums is very friendly and helpful in my experience, although I rarely have a need to go there.
[1] You can do that with Debian, too, of course. But OpenSUSE uses btrfs for the root filesystem by default and has snapper in the base install.
That btrfs and snapper sound interesting. I know nothing about them though. Do you know of some article describing how you use it to revert to previous states of your machine?
Basically what you do is you boot up your computer, enter the password for your encrypted drive, and when on the GRUB boot screen you can select "Filesystem Snapshots" and boot into one of those, which reverts most of your root partition to an earlier state.
The Arch wiki has a decent article about Snapper: <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Snapper>, though note that the OpenSUSE installer makes it easy to set up the btrfs subvolumes.
When I first installed tw, i tested the snapshot functionality first. At the very least understand how it does not (by default) snapshot /home and how it takes an automatic snapshot after rpm (zypper) operations.
Once there was a wifi issue that borked a lot of our machines and very few people actually knew how to rollback or had ever tried it before. A crisis situation is not a good time to test these things. This is especially an issue because as you'll see in the link above not all tw installs will have snapshot support. One major determinator is disk size. It won't get enabled with less than 20gb root space.
I don’t have a specific article, but it did save me a couple of times when Nvidia drivers updates borked the kernel, or X, or both. One line in the terminal to roll back to a stable state, it’s great.
Think of it as debian testing or unstable with more official support, nicer setup and features out of the box (e.g. automatic btrfs snapshots and easy restore, yast) and more automated testing.
TDLR: If you would like a rolling release with a more "offical" status than debian testing and more comfort/quality of life/tests/out of the box features than arch, this seems like an option worth trying.
It's quite the opposite philosophy: Debian keeps things stable for a long time. Tumbleweed updates huge parts of the system rather frequently. And to have a safety net, it takes snapshots of the installation before the upgrade.
You can easily run Debian on 10 year old laptop with a rotating disk. You'd probably don't want to do that with Tumbleweed.
It fully depends on your preferences what you count as an advantage.
If you have a 10+ year laptop then there's not much of an advantage going with rolling distros. Stable Debian/Ubuntu distros would be better suited.
Rolling distros are great if you get a brand new laptop with modern HW and fancy features (AV1 encoding, thunderbolt/USB4, keyboard RGB, OLED displays with HDR, variable refresh rate, etc) that require you to be on the bleeding edge to make use of them.
Of course there is. You get to benefit from the latest versions of GNOME or KDE plus thousands of packages that have more recent versions in rolling distros.
I was talking from the perspective of the average user who's moving from away Windows on their 10+ year old laptop, not the developer/tinkerer focused HN userbase who always wants to be on the bleedings edge.
Debian/Ubuntu stable is more than good enough for 95% of the average users, especially, on such old machines, you're better off with Ubuntu/Debian stable than bleeding edge rolling. You don't get any benefits from rolling on such old hardware for the average user but get more risks from potential issues from being on the bleeding edge.
Ubuntu distros exist that take KDE to the bleeding edge but keep everything else on the sabe branch, you don't need to go rolling distro for that.
Although I'm fond of both Debian and OpenSuse, one disadvantage to be aware of: You have to jump through extra hoops to get media codecs. I understand their reasons, but it was a pain last time I used it.
> I would not call "sudo zypper in opi && opi codecs" a pain :)
I would; that's 2 extra commands that install an additional (unofficial? OBS is like the AUR or PPAs) repo and then install stuff from it, and you have to know to run them at all. Like, it's good that it's in the wiki, but compare the process for a new user:
