Budgie Desktop breakage in Tumbleweed

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If there are any Budgie users on Tumbleweed using the forums, you may find that you’re ending up with a broken desktop, after running a recent zypper dup. I’ll make it clear, that I’m not the Maintainer of X11:Solus or the Budgie Desktop Stack.

But tl:dr, the current maintainer has decided to push unreleased, raw git pulls of the Budgie Desktop to Tumbleweed, that enables experimental Wayland support. Upstream considers this to be a “Very Bad Idea™” and is de-listing openSUSE as a “recommended” provider for the Budgie Desktop, until the situation is resolved.

To be clear, this issue is NOT affecting Leap 15.x, only Tumbleweed, and potentially the Leap 16 Alpha/Beta/Release.

IF you are using Tumbleweed, and would like to revert to the most recent Stable release of the Budgie Desktop, please see: 2025-03-16 Budgie Desktop Workaround | The Crimson Permanent Assurance for instructions.

I can’t promise that it won’t break anything in your Budgie Desktop, but in the testing I’ve been able to do, it seems to cover the majority of cases.

For further information:

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1239655

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Thanks, why do maintainers do this? :thinking:

I have hit bugs in Gnome DB for similar reasons. :smiling_face_with_tear:

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I can’t tell you, and I’m not going to speculate. You would need to ask them.

This isn’t intended to start any sort of flamewar, just providing folks a fallback, if things are broken.

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Not in this specific case, but what’s your general take on this as a Kalpa dev? Do you strictly stick to stable packages or do you pull the occasional unstable ones for insert reasons? :thinking:

When I asked around in the mailing list, @bmwiedemann said some upstream packages went years without a new stable update. It’s true in Gnome DB’s case and so maintainers pull in unstable ones at their discretion. I’m of the opinion that if upstream hasn’t released a stable package it shouldn’t be pushed to normal users by the package maintainer. Better to swap it out for a different package than ship unstable :cold_face:

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Some software doesn’t follow any sort of schedule, or do releases, so yeah, I do pull “unstable” stuff where it makes sense. But I also try to test the hell out of it, before pushing it out to users. And it’s not for “foundational” packages, like desktop environments, which, if broken, cause users to have basically unusable computers.

That being said, the chance of you ending up with a broken update on Kalpa is incredibly slim, due to the nature of the way atomic updates work.

if you happen to be running Budgie Tumbleweed, and you happen to run into this issue, assuming you’re using btrfs, you can just rollback. Which is one of the reason btrfs is the default.

Just to expand on why a Maintainer might do git pulls, and push them to Tumbleweed:

I mean, just as an example, look at grub2:

From grub2.spec in Base:System:
Version: 2.12 Which is [ ] grub-2.12.tar.xz 2023-12-20 11:53 6.4M from the upstream.

Released in December 2023. So, yeah, We’re shipping a “Stable” Version in Tumbleweed.

Except, We’re carrying 274 patches on grub2 So are we really shipping “Stable” ? Many of those patches are for various backported fixes from grub2-CURRENT (I don’t know what source control the grub2 project uses), some are patches for openSUSE specific needs, some are patches for things that for whatever reason, Upstream has declined to accept.

This is a package that pretty much everybody uses, every day. And if you go look at Fedora, or Ubuntu, or Arch linux, I think you’ll find a similar situation with Grub2.

So just making the statement “Only Ship Stable Releases” just isn’t realistic, or practical.

There’s no real difference between using a git pull, vs just doing patching, because they’re both modifying what is ostensibly a “Stable Release” But sometimes it has to be done.

That all being said, I personally don’t feel that this decision by the Budgie maintainer is a particularly good one, but I’m certain they have their reasons.

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For Slowroll I pull updates from Tumbleweed, so it is the packagers’ decision what to include there.

They are also the ones that need to fix occasional fallout.

I found that there is an amazingly large number of useful packages without good/frequent upstream releases. And they don’t always have good alternatives.

One option would be to fork it and become the new upstream, but this needs effort to keep alive, so we can only do that for a few important packages.

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@sfalken @bmwiedemann Thank you very much! :pray:
I begin to understand the complexities involved :cold_face:
Thanks for all your work :100: