I’m a long time Slackware user (since the 90s) but every once in a while I like to switch things up a bit and as I recently bought a new laptop I thought I would give Tumbleweed a spin as I hadn’t tried openSUSE in years.
My early try of openSUSE years ago didn’t impress me much. I found it to be very sluggish and a bit buggy so I am currently very pleased with how far it has come since then. The OS is quite snappy and, so far, not at all buggy.
I installed TW on a new Dell Inspiron 15 7000 with an i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD. The install went very smoothly although I did change from some of the defaults, setting up a root password and using ext4 / partition. Gnome desktop as I have never cared for KDE.
I very much like the idea of using tumbleweed-cli to set up snapshots to control updates/upgrades. Makes a lot of sense. Adding packman and libdvdcss repos provides me with the codecs and such I use regularly. So far all of the software I use regularly has been available to me without issues.
Setting up my wireless printer was a breeze, easiest of any distro I have ever used. A couple of clicks and the correct driver was automatically installed and the printer just worked, no muss, no fuss, no cursing needed.
I was a bit put off at the default lack of F2FS support but worked that out without much hassle.
I had initially planned to just test out TW for a few days and then wipe the drive and replace it with Slack but at this point I’ve decided to keep it as my daily driver. I’ve never really cared much for “automatic” tools in distros but with the annoying exception of packagekit blocking zypper when I first boot the machine everything pretty much stays out of my way. Would uninstalling packagekit cause any undue issue with TW? I don’t bother using the software GUI preferring to just use cli to search/install/uninstall applications.
All in all my impression of Tumbleweed is quite favorable. Color me impressed.
Thanks. I can likely help out a bit with general Linux stuff but in my experience every distro is unique and has it’s own quirks so I doubt I can be too helpful with openSUSE itself (at least right off).
In the end I’m just a dumb old truck driver that likes to tinker LOL
I prefer disable and mask to uninstall. Currently packagekit is not an annoyance on my machines. I enabled background execution and it sends me an email on packages pending.
erlangen:~ # journalctl -b -u packagekit-background.service
-- Logs begin at Fri 2019-04-19 23:18:41 CEST, end at Mon 2019-07-01 07:15:20 CEST. --
Jul 01 05:54:19 hofkirchen systemd[1]: Started Script to update the system with PackageKit.
Jul 01 05:54:26 hofkirchen systemd[1]: packagekit-background.service: Succeeded.
erlangen:~ #
Hi
Those modules are insecure and are disabled by default these days, the developers kindly added blacklists in /etc/modprobe.d so users who wish to use can un-blacklist and rebuilt initrd.
cat /etc/modprobe.d/60-blacklist_fs-f2fs.conf
# The f2fs file system is blacklisted by default because it isn't actively
# supported by SUSE, not well maintained, or may have security vulnerabilites.
# To enable autoloading the f2fs file system module, comment out the
# "blacklist f2fs" statement below. ENABLE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
#
# File system modules loaded at installation time of the suse-module-tools package
# are not blacklisted. This is achieved by commenting out the blacklist
# line in the post-installation script. To prevent the post-installation
# script from modifying this file, delete the line containing "THIS FILE MAY
# BE MODIFIED" at the bottom.
blacklist f2fs
# __THIS FILE MAY BE MODIFIED__
I went the opposite direction, I worked as a telecommunications/IT engineer after college but got into driving truck after I got sick of the corporate world and did a two year stint as a high school teacher.
Thanks for that information. I’ll bear it in mind if I decided to reinstall packagekit. With TW and just upgrading from one snapshot to the next I really don’t see much need for it. Anything that pops up in between snapshots can easily be updated via zypper. I really prefer the cli to GUI tools for that anyway.
I’ve spent a lot of time on Slackware, and have great respect for Patrick and that project. But, recently I’ve started using Tumbleweed myself and I echo your sentiments almost exactly. Having tried Opensuse in the past, I felt like it wasn’t quite polished and had odd bugginess that I couldn’t get past, so I’d typically install it click around and then immediately pave over it. I can now say that Opensuse is my favorite distribution and I look forward to learning more about it. Welcome aboard!
Slackware is definitely for an advanced user, and it will be a game to use Thumbleweed for that user, even if the tools for installation and for updating and managing the system are different, openSUSE comes to your aid because it has yast, from which you can graphically manage everything you need to do from other terminals in other distributions
I’m still undecided but have decided to use it as my daily driver for a while. So far, so good. I really have nothing bad to say about TW at the moment. I’ve done several snapshot changes at the moment and can’t complain. The only thing I’ve done outside of the stock stuff is recompile the kernel with some of my own preferences.
I realize that Yast is the big selling point for SUSE but I don’t really use it that much (so far). I tend to do most things from cli, but I did find it excellent for setting up the printer so I don’t have anything negative to say about it.
Slackware was my first serious Linux distro. The lack of package manager annoyed me too much though and so I switched to openSUSE. I never looked back though I haven’t tried tumbleweed yet. The standard version has recent enough software for me and in place upgrades between versions work well enough
