How long are old isos kept?
Is that deduplicated?
I wish that security updates weren’t necessary.
This is such an annoying chore.
Imagine you could just not upgrade a system and it stays fine.
Way less leverage to enforce enshittification by the vendor.
Security updates are needed because code isn’t perfect.
We all wish that security was perfect all the time - but none of us live in that fantasy world. It would be a similar fantasy world to the one where nobody looks for ways to break into systems for fun or for profit.
That said, you’re not required to patch your systems. It’s just a very, very, very bad idea not to if they’re connected to any sort of network.
It is not a question of the system breaking - if it runs, it runs. Nothing is going to break unless system/hardware changes are made. The analogy is the Apollo rocket that even today could get to the moon on its meagre 78kb of memory…
The question is more, how much needs to be updated at each dup. I try to run an update at least once every week which means not spending more than about 15 minutes on the update itself (it is an old, slow machine). Sometimes I will miss my weekly update and instead of 50 to 100 updates, I will be saddled with more than 300. But the reverse can happen: I have known instances of about 100 updates after two weeks and 2000 updates after just one week. It all depends upon stages of development in different parts of the software. As such it is unpredictable. If you leave it a couple of months, you may find yourself with a vast number of updates - or not since it is sure that there will be updates of updates - rather than going from a particular programme’s v10.4.3 to 10.4.5 to 10.5.0 to 10.5.5, you will jump straight from 10.4.3 to 10.5.5, for example.
If you need more stability - longer delays between updates - Tumbleweed is not meant for you; it is cutting edge, the latest updates all applied as they are released. Leap, on the other hand, will give you less updates and smaller changes - much of the updating is cumulative with new releases and as such, those updates that there are, are security more than functionality. For this reason, Leap runs behind on some common releases - Firefox, for example, will update immediately on TW but may take longer on Leap; unless you draw directly from the Mozilla repo.
We all do, but most of us are glad to know that they are there.
It is an annoying chore like the washing up or cleaning the windows. You don’t have to, but it make things better if you do…
I have Tumbleweed installed on our research workstations here. We regularly need to keep uptimes of several months to finish analysis of neuroimaging data sets. As a result, it’s not uncommon for nine months or so to pass before I can find a good update window. Never had more than very minor problems.
In comparison, I’ve hosed systems on pacman -Syu (erm, I think that’s the recipe; lost a machine during the file migration to /lib64), apt upgrade (Ubuntu causes problems for me more often than not seemingly, somehow), and I had a recurring issue with /dev/mapper eating an lvm volume each time I ran yum/dnf distro updates in Fedora…
Tumbleweed’s not indestructible, but it’s shockingly solid.
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Thank you to all of you!
Not quite. It is a bad solution where most people lost the imagination to make things better.
An actual core system would go a long way.
Traditional code releases are plain and utter PITA. I learned this as early as 1977 and eventually switched to rolling releases in 1984.
Greg Kroah-Hartman proposed rolling releases for openSUSE:
https://share.google/aimode/UEQ16naCGfmYW7ecD
The concept now has matured for a decade. Current versions are virtually indestructible:
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