I installed Slowroll Tumbleweed because I wanted the latest security-conscious updates delivered fairly, ok very, frequently. However, the packaged Mozilla products (both Firefox and Thunderbird are used commonly) seem to lag substantially behind. I know I can choose unstable distros, but then I’m opening my system up to potential vulnerabilities. Is there a reason that OpenSUSE lags behind almost every Linux flavor (except possibly Debian and derivatives that use firefox-ESR), or any way I can tag just one piece of software to update from the unstable distros?
I understand that Open Chat isn’t really a troubleshooting/problem-solving topic, maybe just curious if anyone else considers this a problem. I multi-boot several Linux flavors, including Pop!OS (Ubutu 24.04 derivative) and Linux Mint (same), so maybe my observation is tainted by comparing OpenSUSE’s release “cadence” with Canonical’s. Sometimes the Mozilla dev team is two versions ahead of the packaged version of OpenSUSE Firefox.
I wonder if this problem extends to other browsers, e.g., Chrome(ium), Brave, Edge, etc.?
If you want the newest packages, use Tumbleweed.
Slowroll is ever behind the Versions of Tumbleweed.
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Firefox is the leaf package and so gets the highest delay when selecting updates. If you have good arguments why Firefox must be treated differently you could contact @bmwiedemann.
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Slowroll offered Firefox 137.0.2 on April 17, or two days after Mozilla released it to distribution channels.
Tumbleweed offers 138.0.1 since May 2, or one day after Mozilla released it.
Slowroll has slow in the name but still rolls and that way avoids the occasional glitch that might affect Tumbleweed now and then.
As @Sauerland wrote, you have the choice.
BTW, the ESR version is currently at 128.10 and is available on Slowroll too.
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Thanks all for the explanation(s) and for sharing the “Misunderstandings” I may be laboring under. Still not certain what is meant by a “leaf” update (not involved with the “trunk” of the update tree?) but I have valuable information now. Even if I have high trust in the Mozilla Dev Team (I do), it still seems prudent to wait for the OSS repo to be double-checked for incompatibilities. I am not a fan of using snapper to roll back, especially for rolling release distros. I think I’ll flag my question as “answered”. Thanks again!
Not a Slowroll user here, but AIUI Slowroll has a “major” upgrade once a month or so where the “whole tree” gets an upgrade. Then there are “security updates” several times a week where usually only selected packages that had security patches applied are updated.
So most packages, including Firefox, might appear as being “one month behind” unless they had security problems…
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