I’m running a few different TW versions on my '12 MacPro desktop and I have what was 15.3 Beta installed on a '09 MacBookPro . . . but, I do get “bored” with stability, so I was looking around at the site last night and found the 15.4 Alpha “live CD” iso while running the MBP on 15.3. There didn’t seem to be any usb flash drive burner app installed, so I used Brasero to burn a DVD of it and booted it up . . . .
Using the optical drive it seemed to take quite a while for the system to boot up??? I do recall that optical drive live systems are a bit slower, but it did take quite a bit of time to just get to the GUI. The machine has 8 GB RAM and a SSD . . . overall it is “fast enough” . . . .
I like being an “early adapter” . . . so I could run “upgrade” . . . but hard to tell if Alpha is ready for prime time or, better to wait until Beta?? What do we know about when Beta is slated to drop into the tubes???
IMHO the availability of an alpha release is not for people to cure their boredom, nor to provide a “prime time” (whatever that may be) operating system. It is there for testing. And the community (special those who are working on the new openSUSE version) then hope that those testers report good bug reports. All with the goal to get a new version that is as good as possible.
If you know what you are doing, you can use “dd” to copy the iso to a usb flash drive.
Using the optical drive it seemed to take quite a while for the system to boot up???
Yes, I notice that. There’s not much you can do about it. You are depending on the BIOS to load kernel and “initrd”, and the BIOS routines tend to be slow, particularly with optical media.
I like being an “early adapter” . . . so I could run “upgrade” . . . but hard to tell if Alpha is ready for prime time or, better to wait until Beta?? What do we know about when Beta is slated to drop into the tubes???
It’s an alpha release. By definition, it is not ready for prime time. It is a “use at your own risk” system.
I do have 15.4 Alpha installed in a virtual machine. It seems to be running pretty well. The main risk is that it will not get any urgent security updates. If there are such updates, they will eventually make it into 15.4, but the developers won’t see this as urgent.
The main circumstance where I would recommend it, is if you have hardware that needs a relatively new kernel. Leap 15.4 is using a 5.14 kernel, which is newer than what is in 15.3.
The other thing to remember is that, until the final release, you will need to update using “zypper dup”.
Alrighty, thanks for the reply . . . as usual, the dry sense of humor being appreciated and used in the posts . . . . I guess you missed out on the old Saturday Night Live shows, “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” skits???
So, OK, “bug reports,” that process is a little better over in SUSE than it is in the ubuntu world, but I have my hands full just keeping my several TW distros up to date, like yesterday a mere 1358 packages for a routine weekly upgrade, and today in a Gecko rolling a mere 938 packages . . . that enough to handle for a day’s work.
Thanks for the reply as well . . . but, indeed, I don’t know what I’m doing . . . “dd” is one of those areas where I haven’t tried to mess with it, but might give it a try for this 15.4 processing.
And, yes, “alpha” release, but some times “alpha” is better than other times . . . like Sid over in Debian, sometimes it’s a great cutting edge system and other times it is indeed “unstable.” I had one distro based on Sid actually cut across partition divides and delete data in two other installs . . . very rough trade.
So, maybe I’ll try flipping it over to a flash drive and see how it handles . . . .
The one critical question that wasn’t addressed, in all seriousness, was the “estimated date for 15.4 Beta” arrival?? Any information on that??
Well, you do not reveal where you have residence, but I do, thus you can guess for yourself how likely it is that the “Saturday Night Live shows” that are available to your culture will be send on TV in my environment.
Looking at that data, it looks like Beta is set for Feb 23??? some time in Feb . . . I think I can wait for the Beta before doing an upgrade from 15.3 . . . .
Um, OK, . . . yes, I can see where you reside . . . I am in the States, but, SNL has been around for over 40 years, I’m sure it’s on Netflix or whatever . . . . Not that it’s the highest level of show or humor, but the classic Belushi, et al episodes are more or less “universal” . . . . It’s obviously a choice . . . “no time to waste on humor” and so forth . . . .
I had a few minutes to try to upgrade my '09 MBP from 15.3 to 15.4 a few minutes ago. I had made a usb flash drive from the “live” download iso options since I first posted here around 1/13/22 and I booted that up . . . . It booted up quickly after first scrambling the GUI video into a jigsaw puzzle, otherwise it was fine. I moved quickly to find the “upgrade” icon and clicked on it . . . nothing. I 2x clicked on it. A little spinning wheel icon opened and then closed, I tried it several times.
I went into Yast and found it there and did the same thing . . . I tried “installation” and that failed as well??? I launched Firefox and ran a search term . . . that worked.
I rebooted into the DVD of another DE option that I made before and ran the exact same procedures . . . both “upgrade” and “installation” failed to even open a window to try to ran an upgrade. Otherwise the GUI desktop appeared to be functional, so I guess we can’t say that “Alpha is ready for Prime Time” in the sense of being able to use it to upgrade a system . . . .
Back to the download tray I suppose . . . . :’(>:(
In this part of the world, Cabaret is still alive and well – both live on the stage and, “on the box” – and, it tends to be unashamedly political – but, there are historical reasons for that …
Well, yes . . . Life IS a Cabaret . . . my friend . . . a CAbaREt!!!
I guess Life is also an Alpha distro . . . ??? Variable in manifestation . . . highly variable in the details . . . looks “Good” on the surface, underneath a teeming morass of mixed data??? ;):)
