[viddi]

I have been using Tumbleweed for a few years now, but while it seems like a stable rolling release distribution, I am not quite sure about the "rolling release" part. Each month, a new snapshot comes out, which upgrades every single package you have installed, regardless of whether there were actual upstream updates. With a full Texlive installation and just a few more suites this amount to roughly 10,000 packages and over 5GB that need to be downloaded and installed each month. This a) kind of defeats the rolling-release aspect for me, b) takes a few hours, and c) feels like a cheat for the sake of stability.

Between those snapshots you might have bleeding edge updates for all the packages, but even then I do encounter package conflicts way too often. Well, on the upside, at least they are detected.

So yes, it is stable, but it comes at a price.

Apart from that, the community support felt mediocre, at least a few years ago. The most visited platform was a bulletin board forum with very little interaction. When I had trouble installing KDE, it took a few days until someone suggested the correct diagnostic tools. This is bad for being the testbed of a commercial distribution. In the end, I just installed Arch, which packaged KDE better than Tumbleweed did.

But on the other hand, maybe only if you use a distro long enough, you get to see the downsides, and each one has them.

[cyphar]

There are new snapshots at least once a week. While there are large updates every once in a while, those are usually due to gcc or glibc upgrades which require a rebuild of most packages -- which doesn't happen every month. If you actually have upgrades of every single package every month, you should open a bug report to figure out what is going on -- that is absolutely not normal. On my machine I usually see 10-30 packages per update, with some updates hitting ~100 packages -- anything more than that is quite rare. Large rebuilds should be uncommon, though some packages might do them more than others.

There are quite a few things I've grown to dislike about Tumbleweed after using it for the past 7-8 years, but the upgrade experience is not one of them.

[petre]

Great, thanx for telling. I'll stick to Leap. Update fatigue. We're using it on servers and I'm looking for something to replace Ubuntu on the desktop. I've grown tired of the usual Ubuntu antics like snaps, ads in apt update and the convoluted /etc config hierarchy inherited from Deban. SuSE is structured way more logically and makes more sense even if it's a rpm distribution. I don't want to use a rolling distro at work to break things just when I have to deliver stuff or fix time pressing issues. I've tried Debian 12 when it came out but Firefox was unusable, some very annoying focus issues on forms.

I'd like to know if the Gnome 4 in Leap was usable. If I do a search on software.opensuse.org on gnome-desktop it only turns out packages from tumbleweed and experimental packages from SLE-15-SP2 which looks quite ancient.

[bayindirh]

You can always run Debian testing on desktop. I'm running the same installation more than a decade now. It's not "bleeding edge", but recent enough. Things slow down during freezes a bit, but it's a rolling distro at the end of the day.

[stryan]

>Each month, a new snapshot comes out, which upgrades every single package you have installed, regardless of whether there were actual upstream updates.

A) Snapshots come out far more regularly then once a month. Going from the mailing list we've actually had a snapshot released every day since the 4th. I'd say the average is one every three days but that's just from the top of my head.

B) they do not cover every package you have installed: They don't even know what packages you have installed, snapshots are cut on the repo side. It's true that packages get rebuilt a lot but that's because either the package updated or a dependency of the package updated that caused the package to be rebuilt.

[ssnistfajen]

>So yes, it is stable, but it comes at a price.

That's called a trade-off, a very fundamental concept in pretty much everything in life.

And no, snapshots don't come out every month. They come out ~5 times every week. The most number of packages I've had to update was maybe around ~3500 and that's after 6 month of not upgrading my system.

I agree for "true" rolling distro enthusiasts, Arch is still the top choice, but Tumbleweed is great for those seeking to use a rolling distro without sinking too much time into configuration.