Updates cost huge in TW: an average takes 5-6 GB. I suppose, it rewrites the package to the new version completely. Is it possible to patch instead of rewrite like games in Steam?
It depends on how often you update and your installed packages. But “an average” is most certainly much lower and even the complete distribution rebuild results in something around 1GB download here.
Not as a rule. Yes, full rebuilds happen several times a year, sometimes in quick succession. But it is not that common.
OK, I realized that it was ambiguous. Yes, for each individual package it is complete replacement. But for most updates not every installed package is completely replaced every time you update.
If your question is - is it possible in principle - sure. It just needs someone to implement and maintain. If the question is - is it implemented now - no. Actually, IIRC SUSE plans to stop providing delta RPMs for stable releases too.
You mean they have such a mechanism in Leap but want to remove it?
So, the case there is like: oh, internet is fast enough, so let’s blow packages for updates? Bad arguing, TBW is still low on SSDs and I believe, they will not survive even 10 years writing as low as 10GB/day.
Nah. I’m not sure at least a month passed after the previous update.
1039 packages to upgrade, 27 new, 11 to remove.
Package download size: 2,17 GiB
Package install size change:
| 6,24 GiB required by to be installed packages
52,1 MiB | - 6,19 GiB released by to be removed packages
@psijic that all depends on your hardware selection, most SSD’s these day are good for 20+GB a day? Not had a device (SSD or NVMe) fail here yet, USB sticks a few…
My oldest SSD is a 60GB with around 70,000 hours, it doesn’t get written too much though as it’s in a test machine…
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Everybody who experienced the extremely slow performance of drpms on Leap, will never whish to have this feature on Tumbleweed. Prepare for upgrade times from several hours instead of some minutes…
And if an upgrade of Tumbleweed needs 5-6 GB in download, there is something unusual ongoing on this system…(e.g. everything possible is installed and no maintenance done).
As your terminal output shows, it is the needed diskspace after installation. This is completely different from download size. The needed space on disk is the same for drpm and rpm. So you should read up on this what is the difference between download size snd disk space for installation.
If the likes of user applications are updating, eg installed steam, flatpak applications, that’s not related to the openSUSE update tooling…
Before starting with accusations “what idiots all these developers are”, try to think. Delta RPM is reconstructed on your system. Which means you will have exactly the same amount written - plus the size of delta RPM (or patch if you want) itself.
Of course, nothing stops you from implementing patching on the file level. But that is not what delta RPM is.
5-6 GB changed space (TBW resource). The update to download is 2 GB - huge enough.
Had Leap recently and all updates were fine with speed (not to say many apps were outdated for 3-5 years).
I already changed a 500 GB SSD because of TBW resource depletion (~5 years passed). On the new one I limited TW updates and made browser videos caching in RAM instead of SWAP.
I know that there is a Linux distro that does this, not sure which one it is though.
@psijic So was the device failing, smartctl showed it worn out?
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Fedora offered delta rpms until last release (discussion here). I’ve kept delta rpm support disabled in openSUSE likely since about the time its name was born.
Maybe Slowroll is something for you but which such a large install you likely have additional repo’s and if so that will not work.
Like other say, 5-6 GB is big, I have a reasonable complete system but most typically I am under 2 GB so you could spent some time to find out if are installed packages are needed.
You mean my SSD? Yes, it started to throw memory bugs and the resource was close to the max, so I left it as a media storage read only.
Already installed rpmorphan, but it’s not so simple to cut 6-month unused packages: I have different IDEs and software used not so often.
The easiest way to avoid giant downloads is to update every day. That is also the best plan as far as security goes. Most of my downloads are a few hundred MB, with only occasional 1GB or larger downloads. It could also be helpful to read the definition of “rolling release” and take to heart what it entails. I also use Manjaro, and it is always similar to Tumbleweed in download size. I use an M.2 drive as root and have never had an issue. Your issue may be your SSD.
Yep, that avoids the huge updates - mb-wise, per update.
However, it does not relieve the fact, that over time, it’s STILL the same amount of data applied to the drive.
So, if you update every day, or every two weeks, it still ends up the same amount of data, over the same total period of time.
That’s one reason we abandoned TW (used it for a very long time) and went to Leap. The daily update inconvenience and occasional issue. I’m not complaining about TW - it has its place, just not in this home, anymore 