In reading the announcement of a forthcoming Leap 16, I saw no mention of Slowroll and would like to inquire as to Slowroll’s status.
Is Slowroll being discontinued? Will openSUSE be providing both Leap and Slowroll versions?
Thank you.
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Slowroll is not an ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform) version that Leap 16 will be. ALP protects applications from hacks - at least that is what it is supposed to do. If you cannot get to it - you cannot change it.
Many Linux users do not want or need the ALP model that Business users have demanded since 2003.
Slowroll is a delayed version of Tumbleweed with time for problems that Tumbleweed users can live with but Users with less skill, can be assured that any problems should have been solved when they hit Slowroll.
My 2 cents.
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I’m also wondering what the status of Slowroll is now that OpenSUSE has made their announcement. My understanding was that a poll/vote of OpenSUSE users was held and that Slowroll was the preferred path for the project to take. What happened here?
I need to find out Slowroll’s status in time to decide on using it for future projects (Tumbleweed, while nice, is much too volatile) or whether to start searching for another distro and dropping SUSE/OpenSUSE.
@JeffBerntsen Hi and welcome to the Forum 
Please explain volatile, slowroll gets the same packages at some point (including download size, except in a bigger chunk)?
There is no voting in openSUSE (except by openSUSE Members, eg Board Election), those that do, decide…
ALP/Leap 16 is not the old Leap, there is no upgrade path…
By “volatile” I mean that updates are frequently released and, presumably, not quite as well tested as those going into the current Leap, increasing the chances of a system problem after an update.
One of the arguments made for Slowroll was that, by slowing the frequency of updates, such problems could be fixed before problem packages made it into Slowroll because they would have been dealt with already in Tumbleweed. Is that not the case?
I may have been mistaken to call it a vote but a poll of users was held and Slowroll was mentioned as the preferred solution over ALP, though not by a wide margin.
I understand that ALP/Leap is not the old Leap or even remotely similar to it and that there is no upgrade path. That is part of the problem.
Also, this doesn’t address the original poster’s question or mine: What is the plan for Slowroll now that Leap 16 has been announced as an ALP variant? Is it going to be discontinued?
@JeffBerntsen again, those that do decide… AFAIK those that are doing are still doing it, the release of any other product doesn’t affect what those users ‘that are doing’ to create Slowroll.
I disagree with the statement, all the ‘deemed’ core components are tested via openQA, maintainers can add tests (of any package AFAIK) if they want…
So for example a leaf package like vorta is broken in Tumbleweed and will be broken in Slowroll, in fact it will remain broken in Slowroll longer as the fixed package will be in Tumbleweed first…
I’ve been running Tumbleweed for a number of years without any major issues…
I’m running MicroOS without any issues as well, it just does it’s thing…
Why would that be the case? From my understanding, Slowroll would have less frequent updates, which means smaller download size over time (although the steps might be bigger, you’re not constantly updating) and there is a chance that packages are tested by the Tumbleweed community and , when they are known to cause no big problems, pushed to Slowroll.
I understand that today’s announcement leaves some users with questions, because over the last couple of months things seemed to point to Slowroll being the successor of Leap. I’m not too deep into the topic, because I’m covering the two edge-cases with SLES at work and Tumbleweed for my gaming rig, but even I was kind of surprised by the announcement.
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@mendres82 if you install vorta in Slowroll it’s broken, I have pushed a fix and waiting on the Maintainer to accept, when accepted it will go to Tumbleweed, it won’t been seen in Slowroll until it’s next update gets released…
How so, package x,y and z equal 50MB, perhaps it misses a few updates before being pushed to Slowroll but in all essence x,y and z will still be 50MB… perhaps x got split between releases or an arch change, maybe it’s 51MB now. Sure over time you save a few mega bytes if there are multiple updates.
If your looking at Slowroll for a SLE replacement then you will have to update both machines, double the download (Or maybe Slowroll can work with SMT/RMT/SuMA?).
ALP has been around for a long time… just it’s found a home…
My theory only works as long as packages that have been picked for Slowroll have been tested by the Tumbleweed user base before and therefore have a higher chance of not being broken. However, if a package is broken, the time span til it’s fixed, of course, is longer.
I don’t agree to that because the daily updates add up a lot and doing all steps between, let’s say, a quite current version and a major update lead to much more traffic over time. Over the last couple of weeks I have downloaded updates on Tumbleweed summing up to more than what the size of a fresh offline installer is. There is no need to argue about that though, because it’s the way Tumbleweed works. But I understand the concern with it and Slowroll seems like combining some of the benefits of a rolling release distro and some of a classical release.
Nah, we won’t go away from SLES, so I’m probably not the targeted audience of the new Leap, but I was kind of confused as well, because that announcement broke with many articles about the topic, I read over the last weeks.
@mendres82 Anyway, I think slowroll will be here to stay. I’m happy with Tumbleweed and MicroOS takes care of it’s self…
It would obviously be great to see Slowroll getting some attention and playing a role in the openSUSE universe. For me, SLES and Tumbleweed are doing just fine, but I understand there might be some need for an in-between.
There was a vote, these are the results → Survey Reveals Community Preferences for openSUSE's Future Direction - openSUSE News
Begins at Community’s Vision for openSUSE.
Slowroll…
- Tied for #1 - with Linarote for Contributor Preference
- #1 - Community’s Vision for openSUSE
- #1 - Laptop/Desktop machines
- #1 - Server/Cloud Server machines
Also see Usecase2023 - openSUSE Wiki
No one, up to this post, has answered my question regarding Slowroll.
@epp A survey does not equate to action… I contribute to openSUSE, but no one tells me as a Contributor what I must work on or do… Like I indicated, those that do decide, I suspect that you need to ask the Slowroll folks that ‘Do’, but AFAIK, it will be be around for some time…
I don’t believe any of the developers working on slowroll are here on the forums, so nobody knows the answer to your question.
You would need to ask them.
@mendres82 So it does look like upgrade from Leap 15.6 will be supported…
https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/factory@lists.opensuse.org/message/6MEXFATDGFTO5FD7X4RZ4DSKEECL6N44/
So ALP will be in your future for SLES 
Nothing. Slowroll is one man show. To my knowledge this man still continues to work on Slowroll.
Maybe, we are talking about different things. I’m not using Leap, but Tumbleweed on my private gaming machine and SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLES) at work. So I’m not the targeted audience of Leap yet. But those rumors about Slowroll as successor of Leap got my attention for systems that don’t need to be bleeding edge (for gaming) or provide maximum stability for professional purposes (like SLES). I was kind of surprised, now a different path was picked. Nothing more 
What the Slowroll developers may, or may not choose to do, doesn’t have anything to do with the announcement, when it all comes down to it. They’re different parts of the project, and there’s no reason that they can’t both co-exist, if the developer interest is there to keep both going.
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