I’ve moved to Tumbleweed fairly recently from Leap 42.2, and I’ve found myself disliking the instability of it.I thought Tumbleweed would be almost identical to 15.0 at this point-- with 15 getting close to release-- but Tumbleweed has gotten way ahead in a lot of cases. Has anyone else switched from Tumbleweed to a more stable release? Any recommendations or tips?
For me TW is very stable. For a rolling distro is incredibly stable. Not a crash in 3 months.
Can you describe where you see instability? Like another_roadrunner says IME Tw is rock stable too. Did you file bug reports? Did you ask around here to have issues fixed?
For me, Leap 15.0 looks reasonably close to Tumbleweed. I suppose that’s because I mainly use KDE. For Gnome users it has probably fallen behind. I expect that Gnome in 15.0 is frozen to the version in SLE 15.
In any case, I would not expect serious problems with the downgrade.
I use Xfce in Tumbleweed and 15.0 Beta.
The only difference I have really noticed is that Tumbleweed is slightly Bluer.
Otherwise, both are running without any issues for a couple of months.
thanks for the responses. I’m a KDE person. Also, I use Nvidia’s closed source driver. With that as background, here’s what I’m finding I dislike about Tumbleweed:
Too-frequent Kernel updates. I’ve been through 4.14, 4.15, and now 4.16 kernels since moving to Tumbleweed. Leap 15 uses (I think) 4.12. That’s a fairly significant difference.
Frequently when the kernel gets updated, my graphics driver becomes incompatible with the new kernel, and I have to go back to the old kernel and wait for a new release of the Nvidia RPMs before using the new kernel.
Too much churn for my taste. Since my initial post there are now 210 packages waiting to be upgraded.
The KDE5 task manager sometimes gets lost and fails to respond. This is annoying, but can be fixed by swapping in an alternative (which will also fail to respond after a while, but can be swapped back).
Plasmashell seems to have some kind of memory leak-- it will, from time to time, eat up all of my 32 GB of ram. This can be fixed by killing the plasma desktop and restarting it. But it’s annoying, and if I don’t catch it soon enough my system crashes.
Sleep and hibernate don’t seem to be working with the most recent 4.15 series kernel. Haven’t tried 4.16 because the new nvidia rpms are probably 3 of the 210 that are waiting to be updated.
As far as reporting any of these bugs, I feel like too many packages change too often for any bug report to be at all helpful. Hopefully, changing to Leap 15 will fix all this for me. Using 42.2 I’d go literally months without a problem or even a reboot.
That already pretty much explains it.
For a while, I ran Tumbleweed on an older computer with nvidia graphics. And it was a pain keeping the system up. Yes, Leap 15.0 will be easier to maintain.
A couple of things I notice:
- Updates waiting? It’s well documented that only ‘zypper dup’ is supported to update/upgrade your system. This is because Tw does not release package updates, but gets released over and over again. The desktop applets and YaST do something like ‘zypper up’ which means that f.e. downgrades of packages are not implemented. I’ve seen more KDE issues here and on social media where people did not use ‘zypper dup’.
- Tumbleweed is a rolling release, it follows upstream releases.
A thing to add:
- Transactional updates is the hot thing that’s being worked on, meaning in short that the updates will only be affexted after reboot, Mind, they are installed.
Tumbleweed is ahead, sometimes unstable, mostly irritating with frequent massive updates of everything to the latest version possible.
Leap is lagging behind at the versions of kernels, DEs, apps and servers.
But just between the two is the best of both brands, provided you don’t insist to use the latest DEs of Tumbleweed.
The stability of Leap for the most of the things provided + selective factory of your choice for the latest kernels, apps, servers is the path to this land of El Dorado
Few months ago I had Tumbleweed installed on a VPS for a week or so.
I had added a 3rd party repo which may have been the cause, but after my first Zypper dup I found the next day that cron had broken due to a pam library conflict.
When I discovered this, I first ran zypper dup again without the 3rd party repo — another release was already available — which fixed the problem, then I ran it with the 3rd party repo, and the problem remained fixed.
Whether or not it was my own mistake is not very relevant to me, I can’t risk having a server break down even through user error like that.
From the looks of it it was caused by Tumbleweed itself, so that day Tumbleweed left the building again ;-).
It now runs CentOS – I don’t like CentOS. Still want to install 15.0 but I wasn’t ready to do so yet.
edit:
One of the biggest problems I have with Tumbleweed is that there is simply no older kernel available. It only has one kernel basically, and that’s always the newest.
That’s true about what’s in the repos. However, the previous kernel should be on your system.
At one time, when I had Tumbleweed on a box with nvidia graphics, I set it to also keep the oldest kernel. That way, I would always have around a kernel known to work. After a kernel update, I would check. If a newer kernel was working well, I would delete the oldest kernel, so that “oldest” became the next kernel down the line.
In any case, I use Leap for anything serious and Tumbleweed for experimenting with what will be coming in the future.