Installed Slowroll; shall I remove Tumbleweed?

Greetings,

I have just migrated from Ubuntu to OpenSUSE. After a very eventful yet unsuccessful Leap installation then eventually settled in Tumbleweed. During further testing and suiting Tumbleweed, I spotted a news page from news.opensuse.org titled “Slowroll Updates Boost Stability, Enhance Performance”. That drew my interest to try it, as my Tumbleweed installed seems not stable enough. Therefore, I followed the instructions from this page to download and install Slowroll successfully:

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Slowroll

After resetting OpenSUSE, the GRUB list now shows my OpenSUSE as “Tumbleweed-Slowroll”. I don’t know if it means my OpenSUSE now has both repositories, or it really means “Slowroll”, as in my understanding, Slowroll is actually based on Tumbleweed.

Then, I am trying to remove Tumbleweed. But typing zypper repos, I can only see the following:

Repository priorities in effect:                          (See 'zypper lr -P' for details)
      80 (raised priority)  :  1 repository
      99 (default priority) :  3 repositories

# | Alias                    | Name            | Enabled | GPG Check | Refresh
--+--------------------------+-----------------+---------+-----------+--------
1 | brave-browser            | Brave Browser   | No      | ----      | ----
2 | openSUSE:repo-non-oss    | repo-non-oss    | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes
3 | openSUSE:repo-openh264   | repo-openh264   | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes
4 | openSUSE:repo-oss        | repo-oss        | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes
5 | openSUSE:repo-oss-debug  | repo-oss-debug  | No      | ----      | ----
6 | openSUSE:repo-oss-source | repo-oss-source | No      | ----      | ----
7 | openSUSE:update-slowroll | update-slowroll | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes

And checking the YaST Software Repositories list, there are no Tumbleweed stuff.

So, in a nutshell, is my OpenSUSE now running in Slowroll already? Do I still need to remove Tumbleweed then?

Thank you for reading my very first post in this forum.

Danny Lam

(Updated: thanks for the advise. I have re-edited the text and placed the info copied from Terminal in Preformatted text.)

Show

cat /etc/os-release

Use preformatted text to post computer output, your original post is badly readable.

Oh, many thanks for your speedy reply!

My apology that I am new in forum, so I have no idea what “preformatted text” is. Now I clicked the “</>” button by highlighting the text that I am pasting. Hope it is more readable now:

NAME="openSUSE Tumbleweed-Slowroll"
# VERSION="20240803"
ID="opensuse-slowroll"
ID_LIKE="opensuse suse"
VERSION_ID="20240803"
PRETTY_NAME="openSUSE Tumbleweed-Slowroll"
ANSI_COLOR="0;32"
# CPE 2.3 format, boo#1217921
CPE_NAME="cpe:2.3:o:opensuse:slowroll:20240803:*:*:*:*:*:*:*"
#CPE 2.2 format
#CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:opensuse:slowroll:20240803"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugzilla.opensuse.org"
SUPPORT_URL="https://bugs.opensuse.org"
HOME_URL="https://www.opensuse.org"
DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Slowroll"
LOGO="distributor-logo-Slowroll"

I guess you can see yourself that it is Slowroll. To verify, you could post

zypper lr -d

So the result of running zypper lr -P is as follow:

# | Alias                    | Name            | Enabled | GPG Check | Refresh | Priority
--+--------------------------+-----------------+---------+-----------+---------+---------
7 | openSUSE:update-slowroll | update-slowroll | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   80
1 | brave-browser            | Brave Browser   | No      | ----      | ----    |   99
2 | openSUSE:repo-non-oss    | repo-non-oss    | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99
3 | openSUSE:repo-openh264   | repo-openh264   | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99
4 | openSUSE:repo-oss        | repo-oss        | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99
5 | openSUSE:repo-oss-debug  | repo-oss-debug  | No      | ----      | ----    |   99
6 | openSUSE:repo-oss-source | repo-oss-source | No      | ----      | ----    |   99

Seems similar to the info that zypper repos showed.

Thanks for assuring with me that my system is already in Slowroll. So the following question is: do I still need to remove Tumbleweed? Or this act is already unnecessary?

That is not what I requested.

But this is exactly what I’ve got from the Terminal.

danny@DESKTOP-6TDNI77:~> zypper lr -P
# | Alias                    | Name            | Enabled | GPG Check | Refresh | Priority
--+--------------------------+-----------------+---------+-----------+---------+---------
7 | openSUSE:update-slowroll | update-slowroll | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   80
1 | brave-browser            | Brave Browser   | No      | ----      | ----    |   99
2 | openSUSE:repo-non-oss    | repo-non-oss    | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99
3 | openSUSE:repo-openh264   | repo-openh264   | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99
4 | openSUSE:repo-oss        | repo-oss        | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99
5 | openSUSE:repo-oss-debug  | repo-oss-debug  | No      | ----      | ----    |   99
6 | openSUSE:repo-oss-source | repo-oss-source | No      | ----      | ----    |   99

My apology! Kindly forgive my poor eye-sight…

The result should be:

# | Alias                    | Name            | Enabled | GPG Check | Refresh | Priority | Type   | URI                                                     | Service
--+--------------------------+-----------------+---------+-----------+---------+----------+--------+---------------------------------------------------------+---------
1 | brave-browser            | Brave Browser   | No      | ----      | ----    |   99     | rpm-md | https://brave-browser-rpm-release.s3.brave.com/x86_64   | 
2 | openSUSE:repo-non-oss    | repo-non-oss    | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99     | rpm-md | http://download.opensuse.org/slowroll/repo/non-oss      | openSUSE
3 | openSUSE:repo-openh264   | repo-openh264   | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99     | rpm-md | http://codecs.opensuse.org/openh264/openSUSE_Tumbleweed | openSUSE
4 | openSUSE:repo-oss        | repo-oss        | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99     | rpm-md | http://download.opensuse.org/slowroll/repo/oss          | openSUSE
5 | openSUSE:repo-oss-debug  | repo-oss-debug  | No      | ----      | ----    |   99     | N/A    | http://download.opensuse.org/debug/slowroll/repo/oss    | openSUSE
6 | openSUSE:repo-oss-source | repo-oss-source | No      | ----      | ----    |   99     | N/A    | http://download.opensuse.org/source/slowroll/repo/oss   | openSUSE
7 | openSUSE:update-slowroll | update-slowroll | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   80     | rpm-md | http://download.opensuse.org/update/slowroll/repo/oss   | openSUSE

As you can see, base openSUSE repositories are Slowroll. The openh264 is external and should work for both any Tumbleweed-derived distribution.

Thanks. So I am already good to go?

i am sorry if this is a bit off topic, but. If you want a slowroll, you can just update tumbleweed once a month, as far as i understand how it works - it would be the same experience, maybe i am wrong

This is wrong.

Slowroll:

  • continous bug fixes and security fixes as they come in
  • big updates once per month

Tumbleweed:

  • continous updates, bug fixes and security fixes as they come in

Upgrading a rolling release distribution like Tumbleweed only once per month leaves your system highly vulnerable to issues introduced/discovered by former upgrades. It is often a missunderstanding of beginners that it is not necessary to keep an operating system up to date.

@hui Hmmm, once a month?
New Slowroll update 20240906T0313 released!
New Slowroll update 20240906T1700 released!
New Slowroll update 20240907T1752 released!

Three in two days… :wink:

That’s a quote from the Slowroll SDB.

As security fixes do not follow a fixed time schedule (once a month or year or whatever), it is also possible that you get them daily even on Slowroll.

I don’t know if it was my problem or Tumbleweed really doesn’t suit me. Of course it is good to have the most updated stuff always, but if the new stuff is really not suitable for your PC or hardware, and you update the stuff too soon, that could cause a problem. Last time I updated the video drivers, then the display became horribly jerky or even could not launch any command, so that I have no choice but to reinstall the OpenSUSE.

Referring to other source, Tumbleweed is commented for this:

“The fact that Tumbleweed is constantly receiving updates can also lead to problems, like workflow or tool breakage, and is generally rough around the edges. If this occurs, Tumbleweed does have tools to roll back to a previous state to avoid these issues. Tumbleweed follows Linux kernel releases very closely.”

(Source: openSUSE Leap vs Tumbleweed: What's the Difference?)

As a novice in Linux and a starter of OpenSUSE, I think Tumbleweed could be too fast for me, but Leap is too “advance” for me, therefore, if there is a “middle-way” for me, I would like to go for Slowroll to have a try.

are you aware that you probably could do a rollback

Not at that time. Plus, I evaluated that reinstalling would be faster than looking for solutions to reload video drivers in tty, so…

Hi,

reading about your issues I felt maybe Slowroll might not suit you well either. The reason would be that Slowroll is also a rolling release at the end of the day. What I mean by that is at the very least you could have daily patches coming at you, so there will be some back and forth on your box anyways.

However, when it comes to graphics drivers I feel it might be necessary to reinstall drivers after a kernel upgrade. When that happens - and I assume it might 8 - 10 times in a year - therefore you might not be “off the hook” as you may have wished.

Next point is, as you have painfully observed, you might be forced to do something about driver issues if a new kernel comes in. Therefore, I my view, if you want to use Tumbleweed or Snowroll maybe you should be prepared to handle driver things.

So here is my advice if you will: Maybe you need a functioning Linux right now, to do your thing (surfing, banking, etc). So you install openSUSE Leap 15.6, customize maybe a little bit but don’t go overboard. Install your browser(s) and your app(s).

Additionally you install openSUSE Tumbleweed, this will be your pet system for a while, it is to be thrown away later anyway. Why Tumbleweed and not Slowroll? - With Tumbleweed as a rolling release nearly each passing day something should be happening there in terms of updates and patches, right? So you can squeeze your learning journey if you use Tumbleweed for learning.

I feel it would be best to have 2 SSD’s in your box, where you can independently install things. I don’t know your circumstances, therefore it might be better advice to use that SSD you have (should be 256GB at least, I guess) and maybe install your Leap System with the partition option of “extra XFS for /home” checkbox left UNCHECKED, and having a “swap partition” also left UNCHECKED.

That way you can install all Leap on a single BtrFS partition, and after you did the installation you open a partitioner - or you additionally install GParted which I find nice - and reduce the size of your BtrFS say clipping off 60GiB (64GB) or more, it depends on your SSD’s size. Use that newly UNACLLOCATED space to place your Tumbleweed system right there - and off you go.

What do you think? I hope it sounds doable to you. That way you could learn working with your throw-away Tumbleweed pet system every day, don’t be shy, read about and try out a rollback early on, if things go south, you can reinstall Tumbleweed sacrificing 20 min and have a clean slate again.

Install an app of your choice, maybe an extra browser, learn where data land, where configs are placed, uninstall the app, see what’s been left (data, config), install it again. Did it all go smoothly? After maybe 3-6 months you have “seen it all” - then you can make a decision. Flush your SSD and install Tumbleweed or Snowroll for good.

Good luck !! - Regards, M.

Your reply is so touching and informative. Therefore I am so eager to give you a reply, although the discussion in this thread is becoming out of topic.

But first of all, please accept my apologies that I am replying your message late, as I have spent quite a lot of time to reinstall my openSUSE to Leap and settle with it. Also I apologise in advance for my being novice and ignorance not only in openSUSE, but also in Linux.

As I have just mentioned, I have reinstalled my openSUSE to Leap. However, this is not due to your comment and suggestion, though your suggestion did inspire me to do the reinstallation. I reinstalled openSUSE to Leap, mainly as a “redemption”. I must be honest. I have found that migrating from Tumbleweed to Slowroll (I later wiped off the partition to reinstall Slowroll) did not help the problems that I am facing. I still need to press Esc key once or twice during the splash screen to make it successfully boot up the OS. I still cannot find a better H264 codec for very high resolution movie clips. Realising that I have great misunderstanding with Leap, I chose to reinstall openSUSE Leap. Although I am still facing those problems that stated above, I would sort them out later on.

Within these days after I have moved back to Leap, I am still receiving update notification on and on. That has proved that I have really great misunderstanding with Leap that it would give me update to the system slow, causing problems or instabilities to the OS. Not really. Leap is great. I think even I have got customised in openSUSE Leap, I am unwilling to move to Tumbleweed or Slowroll. But it is not due to I am not a hardcore Linux user that I just need a free OS for internet browsing, banking or free replacement of Windows and MS Office. If so I could just stick back in Ubuntu. I migrated from Ubuntu to openSUSE, because I want to learn more serious Linux stuff, so that I can maybe pursue the system admin role in Linux later.

One more stupid sharing: frankly, within this month struggling with openSUSE (I have installed openSUSE more than five times but less then ten times. Practice makes perfect), I have seriously considered giving up and moving to Red Hat Linux. But I have done a thing to force myself stuck in openSUSE. What is that? Well, I bought a bum bag with openSUSE lizard logo on it from openSUSE Shop (that cute lizard makes me unwilling to part with openSUSE)! Seriously, I think openSUSE is hard. Maybe it is not the problem that Leap or Tumbleweed or Slowroll which one really suits me or not, but is openSUSE indeed does not suit me. However, I am not reconciled for that. I really want to overcome it.

Hi Danny Lam,

thank you very much for your considerate reply. It is good to hear some “fog” might be clearing up for you.

Me, too, I think openSUSE is in a league in its own. As other distros are, too. It is not meant in the sense of a hierarchy, though. openSUSE is praised for its stability, for a certain level of professionalism in and of itself as well as of its community. That SUSE has the YaST GUI as an additional aid for administration was and still is of great help and its praise is well earned.

However, openSUSE seems not what comes to mind for people in the “advise disgruntled Windows users where to go next” business. There, it mostly might be Ubuntu, LinuxMint, sometimes even Fedora. Still I use >10y old Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks. Which distro(s) are best suited for hardware that old? My favourite was Kubuntu when I bought the refurbished ThinkPads that time, however, I could not get ALL hardware components “connected” to the Kubuntu OS of its day, letters were blurry in Firefox and so on.

So I tried some distros and out of the box openSUSE Leap 42.x was the distro which saved the day back then. No more blurryness, I liked KDE Plasma very much and using Thinkfan I could even tame the fan. And with that I became an openSUSE desciple, right?

Me, too, I tried not only openSUSE Leap but even Tumbleweed that time. I heard Tumbleweed was a “rolling release” and, therefore, I would always have the latest version of all the packages installed, which I was interested in very much because that time I embarked on a journey wanting to learn not 6 but 20 different-as-can-be programming languages. Which I did.

However, otherwise, Tumbleweed might not be the right “tool for the job”. If you just need a stable OS for the programs you want to run, then Tumbleweed would not offer the stability you could have otherwise. If you really want things to be stable, maybe openSUSE Leap, LinuxMint, or Debian would be your choice?

I feel, some kind of tradeoff always is to be made here. On the VERY stable side (Debian) the software on your system might be tried and tested, that is for sure, however, it also might be ( whispering ) quite old. On the not so stable side with more updates as you already have seen, you could have openSUSE Leap. LinuxMint might be somewhere kind of “in the middle”, right? So that is the choice we have ( to make ).

Therefore, openSUSE Tumbleweed and even ArchLinux or Slack is really for Linux enthusiasts, which would not mind “repairing” a “broken” OS when a “botched” update just came right in, right? I think that is the price to pay if you want the latest of the latest software all year around.

So, where do you stand now, which decisions have you made, what would be your choice for the next weeks and months?

All the best,

Regards, M.