Hi everyone. I have been an openSUSE user for 10 months now. I have always had TW installed but recently, after the release of the 6.7.x kernels I have definitively resorted to slowroll. As I’ve often mentioned, I have a particularly old laptop (but with an SSD) that has always done its job. In addition to the old laptop I have a NUC 12 PRO with Intel core i5 1240P with Windows 11 PRO and in virtualbox I have tried many vms, especially openSUSE TW. I recently re-enabled Leap 15.6 KDE which is running very well in vm. The only problem I have often encountered are many incompatibilities with various packages coming from packman. Now I would like to ask: considering that in the coming times I will have time problems more and more often, what can I use for work. In addition to 1 Windows PC, I have always had 2 devices as a redundancy reserve. Obviously you will have understood that I am not a computer scientist but an amateur. I don’t have the time or skills to delve into command line mode. In addition to the updating that I do strictly in the terminal, I always prefer the gui. The incident with the first 6.7.x kernels pushed me to abandon TW. Now I’m using it in vm but with longterm kernel and always with KDE. I don’t need a rolling release but I don’t appreciate too old distros either. The idea I had at the beginning of slowroll was mistakenly that it was a release that included packages already extensively tested in TW. But after the ISO 20240213 I realized that the only difference is much more subtle, marginal. What do you recommend? Thanks in advance to everyone who will give me their opinions/advice. Mauro
I haven’t experienced any issues with 6.7.x kernels. No doubt a difference in our hardware. I also don’t rely on any Packman repos. I also can’t comment on experience with “ISO 20240213”.
I can comment on TW, which I’ve been running for years. All on bare metal desktops and laptops (i.e, not in a VM).
I have recently installed TW Slowroll, though it’s in a VM. Correction, it’s not in a VM anymore, as I didn’t experience any less maintenance compared to TW, so I deleted it.
A very long time ago, I tried Leap, but preferred the TW rolling updates, so
removed it too.
I’ve also recently dabbled with MicroOS Kalpa. The only thing I couldn’t get used to is it’s really just a one-user focused distro.
Anyway - in a roundabout way, it sounds like you answered your own question, based on your abandoned TW comment, plus the comment about Slowroll.
Have you tried Kalpa ? Might give it a shot, in a VM.
The 6.7.6 kernel was a nightmare for me and many others judging by the recent forum posts.
Now that an LTS kernel is here, hopefully things get better in the future.
The current one 6.6.18 has the same bugs as 6.7.6 but hopefully it gets patched soon.
I too moved to Slowroll due to the issues with the kernel but the buggy kernel followed me there too, I’ve asked the Slowroll devs about it, though they’re yet to see/comment on it.
For myself, I prefer the Slowroll updates. It’s way less than TW and I don’t have to do a full reboot every morning. Just wish Slowroll would test packages more thoroughly, but can’t complain about the results as it’s just one dev working on it full time at the moment.
Regarding the changes b/w TW and Slowroll being subtle, it’s but I think that’s intentional. The goal is to track TW as much as possible but protect end-users from more of the system breaking stuff and constant update/reboots.
Regarding packman being trouble, it could be due to using their TW repos.
Packman has a Slowroll repo for their Essentials, I’m using only that and there are no conflicts/bugs.
My zypper repos for reference:
pavin@suse-pc:~> zypper lr -dEP
# | Alias | Name | Enabled | GPG Check | Refresh | Priority | Type | URI | Service
---+-------------------+---------+---------+-----------+---------+----------+--------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+--------
8 | packman | packman | Yes | (r ) Yes | Yes | 90 | rpm-md | https://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/packman/suse/openSUSE_Slowroll/Essentials/ |
6 | base-update | base--> | Yes | (r ) Yes | Yes | 95 | rpm-md | https://cdn.opensuse.org/update/slowroll/repo/oss/ |
2 | base-non-oss | base--> | Yes | (r ) Yes | Yes | 99 | rpm-md | https://cdn.opensuse.org/slowroll/repo/non-oss/ |
3 | base-openh264 | base--> | Yes | (r ) Yes | Yes | 99 | rpm-md | https://codecs.opensuse.org/openh264/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/ |
4 | base-oss | base--> | Yes | (r ) Yes | Yes | 99 | rpm-md | https://cdn.opensuse.org/slowroll/repo/oss/ |
7 | google-chrome | googl-> | Yes | (r ) Yes | No | 99 | rpm-md | https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/x86_64 |
9 | shiftkey-packages | GitHu-> | Yes | (r ) Yes | No | 99 | rpm-md | https://rpm.packages.shiftkey.dev/rpm/ |
10 | vscode | Visua-> | Yes | (r ) Yes | No | 99 | rpm-md | https://packages.microsoft.com/yumrepos/vscode |
If you make decisions like this based on a single incident, you’ll be forever changing distributions. They all occasionally will run into an issue that needs to be fixed quickly - and this happens even with non-OSS operating systems, too.
openSUSE gives you the option of having the root partition on a filesystem (btrfs) that you can roll back updates on. With Tumbleweed this is highly recommended, because if you run into an issue with a kernel update, you always can roll back to the previous installation, report the issue (or research it), and wait for a fix.
I’ve been running TW since late 2022 on bare metal, and the 6.7.x kernel issue you mention didn’t seem to affect me at all - as myswtest said, it’s likely hardware-specific, and those kinds of bugs are almost always going to find their way in, as there’s no way to test on every possible hardware configuration.
TW also now has an LTS kernel option available, as you see.
There’s always a tradeoff in terms of being “up to date” and “stable”. I’ve found that openSUSE does a good job with providing options, and TW gets fairly thorough automated testing (can’t catch everything, but it catches a lot) between releases. So if being current is more important than stability, then TW is your choice. If stability is more important than being on the latest “everything”, Leap or Slowroll is your choice.
Another option is Kalpa, which is an immutable KDE desktop system. It’s based on Tumbleweed, but implements a “normally” read-only system volume (not including the configuration files in /etc and a few other directories IIRC) that is updated in a transactional manner. Just like TW, Slowroll, and Leap, you have the option to roll back from an update gone wrong, so you nearly always are going to be able to recover pretty easily.
As am NON-Technical, self was in similar position, using Tumblweed for a while and realized Tumbleweed was a bit more technical than my capabilities, so returned to using Leap.
Hi, running Tumbleweed on my HP Z440 Desktop since December 2021, not missed a beat, hardware issues with amdgpu and HDMI (screen sleeping), switched to all Nvidia and not looked back with the GNOME DE…
@hendersj @pavinjoseph @myswtest
Good evening gentlemen. I am busy in a job far from programming. I use libreoffice and qgis (also in windows). I’m starting to use gimp and other programs to have an alternative to a system (windows) that has never created major security problems for me (I’m a bit paranoid about security). But the developments of the Windows system are pushing in a direction I don’t like. A system that is becoming a little too invasive and not very inclined towards privacy. I’m over 60 and despite a lot of energy we are no longer so inclined towards too many new things all at once. I have bare metal slowroll in the old laptop which is fine now as the only OS (longterm kernel). A month ago with the new kernel of TW 6.7.x I found myself idle with the CPU at maximum and the fans unable to cool it. I tried booting from a read-only snapper again with no improvement. The only alternative, for an amateur like me, was to install Slowroll straight away. My request is how mature is slowroll? In the last few days I’ve been getting more updates than in the past. In fact, 2 days ago I installed, in vm, TW again with the longterm kernel and so it goes much better. This is certainly much better than in the past. In vm with windows 11 pro as host I have linux mint 21.3, mx linux 23.2 both with XFCE desktop. Furthermore, always in vm I have 2 Leap 15.6 KDE the aforementioned TW KDE, 2 slowroll XFCE and KDE and finally Leap 15.5 XFCE. Unfortunately my VMs are on hardware that the various forums define as too recent: Intel NUC 12 PRO and a few VMs are really good. I’m very happy with just openSUSE and Fedora but the latter absolutely doesn’t work with my hardware. So I’m only left with my main favorite openSUSE. All I have to do is choose the definitive version. I only have a few weeks to get an openSUSE specification up and running professionally…
@malcolmlewis @paulparker I’m just with the basic packman repositories. And until the 6.7 kernel issue I was solely responsible for the TW problems. With the 6.7 kernels in TW I had a huge increase in RAM consumption already in idle. To make you understand my difficulties: I have never managed to have the minimize/maximize window button in the windows in GNOME…
Not very, still experimental as per its Wiki page.
Just one dev working on it full-time.
I was so frustrated with the kernel issues I shopped around for an alternative, there are support packages for SLED (SLE desktop) starting around the same prices as for RHEL. I believe it was around $300/yr.
Perhaps someone more experienced can chime in, but SLED should give you backported new kernels if you’re running new hardware. It should also be very stable with minimal updates like Leap. Difference is you pay for support should anything go wrong or if you have special considerations.
Now I wish you good night. I have to log out. The children are waiting for me to go to bed
@Keyran17 you just turn it on in the tweak tool or via gsettings…
I have claws-mail, google-chrome, polari and slack running as well as the usual background applications…
free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 125Gi 4.2Gi 119Gi 88Mi 3.3Gi 121Gi
Swap: 0B 0B 0B
For the long term, then I would suggest Leap or Leap Micro…
This
I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7 bought on 02/03/2023 and when I installed it (TW, kernel 6.2.9-1-default) it was quiet as a mouse. But since a couple of months, the updates have really started to put a real spin on the fans. I haven’t really figured out what the problem is as I was hoping it was something temporary. But it looks like I have to start trying to find the problem. It is possible that it is not kernel but something else.
Even I (LOL) couldn’t have said this any better, Jim! Exactly. Just because you ran into an irritating bug like this, it is only a hiccup that you may never run into again. Switching elsewhere will just make certain you run into some other irritating bug.
From your posts, I am getting a strong sense that you are best served to use Leap. Personally, I use Xfce with LightDM, have done so for a few years with no real glitches. The danged thing just keeps running and running and running.
And, Windows Security was never any good, right from Windows 1.0 on. That is why it was necessary for years to purchase third party virus scanners, firewalls, and more.
The last time I had Windows on a machine was about a decade ago, and I have not missed it.
BTW: Using a certain desktop, Xfce in my case, does not really limit you to the applications that come with the desktop. I use a few kde applications very regularly because they happen to work the way I want them to. I choose my applications by testing a few different ones, then settling on the one that does things the way I want it to.
Leap 15.6 is still in Beta. I would stick with 15.5 if you want greater stability.
@dzimmerm1956 thanks for the feedback. Leap 15.5 was never in tune with my hardware. In an old laptop I installed Slowrool with kernel-longterm and it works very well as the only OS. In vm Leap 15.6 and slowroll are fine. I tried again, in vm, TW with the new kernel 6.7.7.1.1 and this is also very good
Add here that my using GNOME and in particular learning the terminal commands made my learning so much easier.
I found the terminal was easier for my learning how to do updates, installs, uninstalls and many other tasks…
.