OpenSuse Tumbleweed: State-of-the-art desktop and server operating system
get.opensuse.org
get.opensuse.org
TIL:
https://tr.opensuse.org/Patterns#What_are_Patterns.3F
> 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?
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.
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.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed should be renamed to OpenSuse Testing.
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Many projects either don't offer packages for it, or you need to use the in-distro package, which are certainly out of date.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.
But yes, there are quite a few projects without direct support for OpenSUSE, for my needs it hasn't been a big problem so far.
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.
It feels like it's a problem with every rpm-based distro, unfortunately
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.
Use an Arch Distrobox or Flatpaks if you can't find a specific package in OBS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
potential issues from the bleeding edge on 10 years old laptops ? Exceedingly rare (I have a 10 years old laptop on a bleeding edge distro)
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.
Daily driving Tumbleweed for 2+ years.
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:
OpenSuse:
1. Open firefox, go to youtube or whatever.
2. Get error message about unsupported format.
3. Do a web search on that error.
4. Hopefully stumble across https://en.opensuse.org/Codecs and thence https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Installing_codecs_from_Packman_r...
5. Run the needed 2 commands to install codecs
Debian:
1. Open firefox, go to youtube or whatever.
(There is no step 2)