I am seeing quite a few posts with Tumbleweed Users complaining about Plasma6 being pushed into Tumbleweed before it is thoroughly and completely tested with the bugs worked out.
(Note: I am NOT referring to users who are asking for the help, which is what we are all about.)
For a bleeding edge rolling release, Tumbleweed is a very stable version of our openSUSE distro.
The key words are bleeding edge, though. Tumbleweed is for those of us who want the very latest and bleeding edge advancements. As such, Tumbleweed users should always be expecting to run into some bugs and glitches now and then: This is what happens at the bleeding edge. In fact, Tumbleweed users are generally expected to Welcome such glitches and contribute by bringing them to the attention of others, or by solving and providing the answers to others.
In Tumbleweed, many of these bugs are discovered and solved before the new is added to the longer term, more stable Leap version.
As such, if you do not want to deal with the fun and adventure of wrestling with and whipping a misbehaving system back into shape, then: Instead of complaining about something as being “rolled out too soon”, you should stick to Leap.
If you use Tumbleweed, expect and deal with the issues that occasionally come with it. In my experience, that seems to happen far less often than I would expect.
It is my impression that the update to Plasma 6 went surprising well.
Yes, there are forum complaints. I did not see many new bugzilla reports.
For me, it was quite smooth. I logged into “Icewm” to do the update – I assumed it would be unwise to update from within plasma. It updated cleanly. Then I rebooted and logged into Plasma 6. And all was well, except that “pam_kwallet” wasn’t working. (That’s one of the bug reports that I did see, and I added a comment to that report).
It is pretty much a “darned if you do, darned if you don’t”. There were also people asking within 24 hours of the Plasma 6 release (and I think it was even within 6 for a few) why it wasn’t in TW already.
When I refer to complaints, I do not mean the people posting threads with an issue and asking for help. I am referring to the complaints that it is all the fault of the the devs and it should not be rolled out like this. Especially, the rather derogatory complaints.
There was a not-insignificant part of the user base screaming for the Pre-Release version to be there, on other of our communications platforms.
This is a Major Software Stack, and I’m somewhat clued into some of our fellow distributions and how they’ve handled it, from my experience and knowledge, we’re having a smoother go of it than ArchLinux, and a rougher one than Fedora. This upgrade is also, from personal experience much less problematic than Plasma 4 → Plasma 5 was, or KDE 3 → Plasma 4.
I do get very tired of the endless complaining about software that is largely written by volunteers and released for free. Trust me, the developers would love nothing more than to just release perfect software, that’s bug-free, and secure. But not even commercial vendors with lots of paid developers can manage that.
Tumbleweed developers eventually got it! Upgrade was fully automatic:
erlangen:~ # journalctl --boot a1cf63578f2049148d10e6554673456c -u transactional-update.service -g 'Consumed|packages'
Mar 14 05:47:56 erlangen transactional-update[19451]: Reading installed packages...
Mar 14 05:47:56 erlangen transactional-update[19451]: The following 232 packages are going to be upgraded:
Mar 14 05:47:56 erlangen transactional-update[19451]: The following 481 NEW packages are going to be installed:
Mar 14 05:47:56 erlangen transactional-update[19451]: The following 183 packages are going to be REMOVED:
Mar 14 05:47:56 erlangen transactional-update[19451]: 232 packages to upgrade, 481 new, 183 to remove.
Mar 14 05:52:48 erlangen systemd[1]: transactional-update.service: Consumed 2min 8.833s CPU time.
erlangen:~ #
Some minor annoyance:
erlangen:~ # journalctl -b -u display-manager.service -g 'VT|session'
Mar 15 07:34:06 erlangen sddm[1273]: Using VT 2
Mar 15 07:34:06 erlangen sddm-helper[1424]: pam_unix(sddm-greeter:session): session opened for user sddm(uid=477) by sddm(uid=0)
Mar 15 07:34:06 erlangen sddm-helper[1424]: Starting X11 session: "" "/usr/bin/sddm-greeter-qt6 --socket /tmp/sddm-:0-fexrue --theme /usr/share/sddm/themes/breeze-openSUSE"
Mar 15 07:34:06 erlangen sddm[1273]: Greeter session started successfully
Mar 15 07:34:17 erlangen sddm[1273]: Reading from "/usr/share/wayland-sessions/plasmawayland.desktop"
Mar 15 07:34:17 erlangen sddm[1273]: Session "/usr/share/wayland-sessions/plasmawayland.desktop" selected, command: "/usr/libexec/plasma-dbus-run-session-if-needed /usr/bin/startplasma-wayland" for VT 3
Mar 15 07:34:17 erlangen sddm-helper[1556]: pam_unix(sddm:session): session opened for user karl(uid=1000) by karl(uid=0)
Mar 15 07:34:17 erlangen sddm-helper[1556]: Starting Wayland user session: "/usr/share/sddm/scripts/wayland-session" "/usr/libexec/plasma-dbus-run-session-if-needed /usr/bin/startplasma-wayland"
erlangen:~ #
sddm supports Wayland user sessions, but still runs X11. Each graphical login now uses two VTs.
As usual the few just complaining and not really discussing gets a lot of attention in forums. I see that in several forums (non-IT forums). At the same time, be aware (I am sure you are) that there are thousands that are happy and really thankful for all the work the developers do, but as usual they are quiet.
I am not an IT person and cannot contribute to OS, but I would me more than happy to say thank you by donating a small amount of money now and then. Look to Linux Mint, they have done it in brilliant way.
In the mean time, I can only say thanks for all the good work, I love OS TW, Windows is thrown out of my house for good.
I think the main problem is that most people probably don’t read the forums. I know I was guilty of that, back when I started my linux journey. For example, the common issue that “widgets broke after the update”, indicate that most users had no idea that a major update was even happening. Also, I only found out to update from the tty because of this very helpful forum, which a lot of people probably missed.
I think a big message should appear before such major updates, to warn the Binbows refugees.
Another problem is that some “old horses” urge newcomers to update very frequently and I don’t think that to be the best advice. Instead somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing should take their time with an update to understand what will happen to their system and how to recover it if something breaks. Especially on tumbleweed you can skip a few updates without a problem (weeks, not months of course).
All in all, I gotta say I had a smooth update and am very happy with the new version. Back when I was using Arch, (btw) I had major issues after every minor update, which never happened with tumbleweed. So kudos to the OpenSuse guys and gals who dedicate their time to bring us such an awesome distro
I often get the impression that people that preferred Tumbleweed over LEAP did not really assess the pros and cons of the two for their needs when comparing.
Given that I have seen all KDE majors starting from 1, this upgrade went fairly well. Just a few minor things like dolphin servicemenus having moved pickup location again, dolphin media preview not working, keyboard shortcuts, the nagging kdewallet etc. Nothing too serious and way better that the initial plasma release. So, good job!
For me the whole machine crashed. I don’t know why but no initramfs was found, maybe there’s no new kernel at all. The update-process stalled and closed the plasma session.
It was now mentioned several times that you need to to the major upgrade from a CLI/TTY seesion. There are even dedicated threads for it…If you do it from a GUI you will screw up…
new snapshot, new kernel today 
