I’m currently using Tumbleweed with Plasma 5 Desktop, and I don’t have any practical experience about Leap (I was previously with the 13.* branch).
How does Leap compares to Tumbleweed under aspects like stability and performance? I must admit that TW is a really good distro, but sometimes it is a bit slow and little responsive; I suppose that the culprit is that my laptop is a bit old and the hardware is not pristine anymore, but I’m still wondering if Leap could give me a better experience.
I value the rolling release system much, but I could consider to leave it if I can get a sensibly improved performance.
If there is someone that is using both and can offer a concrete comparison, I would be interested to hear their experiences.
Because Tumbleweed (TW) is a rolling release I would bet that stability
SHOULD be slightly better with Leap, with one vig caveat: openSUSE is a
bit crazy about testing, in a good way, where the use of OpenQA is testing
everything in the rolling release a million times before release, which is
why the stability in what is normally considered 'bleeding edge" is so
high. Leap benefits from that too, of course, because eventually stable
packages make into Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), but that’s how it
is supposed to work.
Enterprise cares about stability first, where TW cares about getting
current code out first, and they kind of meet (in my opinion) with Leap
with more testing happening with the more-stable distros; still, add
enough testing to TW, and the deltas in stability become smaller and smaller.
Also, I would not bet on Leap to help performance necessarily unless later
versions of things like KDE impose big performance hits. Perhaps that is
the case, but I would bet that a laptop that is “a bit old” will probably
benefit from a couple extra GBs RAM, or a lighter desktop environment,
more than changing to Leap.
You could probably test this fairly simply if you could find a comparable
hard drive (don’t go from spinning currently to SSDs on the new drive)
where you could install Leap and then see how it performs. hard drive
performance can impact a lot quickly, thus the need for something comparable.
Another option may be to help your current laptop by giving it an SSD if
it does not already have it.
–
Good luck.
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I have an Nvidia GTX 950 graphic card and read that it’s better to use Leap with proprietary drivers. Is it good to use Tumbleweed? What if I want to use TW with only latest LTS kernel (4.9 now)? Can I restrict updates for extra week waiting for better stability or better should wait for Leap 42.3?
4.9 because it’s only a step behind to 4.10 where 12309 was fixed (or close to it) and not at the end of life.
Why I need it to compile and maintain by myself if it’s a LTS version? Can I simply switch kernels like in Manjaro/Mint etc?
Tumbleweed v. Leap? It depends… Tumbleweed is potentially and inherently less stable because it’s updated much more frequently and to a greater extent, which can in itself be irritating to a normal user (as opposed to a developer’s needs). For example the latest snapshot (20170529) has a massive update to gcc7, and seriously breaks mozilla’s Thunderbird and Firefox on the desktop (ref Factory ML). I’m trying to avoid it until fixed…
However, focusing on your situation, and coincidentally my own [currently], the question is Tumbleweed/Plasma 5 v. Leap/Plasma 5? They are definitely not at the same level of development, at least wrt Plasma!
How does Leap compares to Tumbleweed under aspects like stability and performance? I must admit that TW is a really good distro, but sometimes it is a bit slow and little responsive; I suppose that the culprit is that my laptop is a bit old and the hardware is not pristine anymore, but I’m still wondering if Leap could give me a better experience.
My laptop, multi-booting both systems, is also a bit old (Intel C2D processor). Tumbleweed/Plasma has been more reliable than Leap 42.2 Plasma, albeit potentially less stable. That is probably due to the difference in Plasma releases.
Performance is more difficult to compare here. Tumbleweed (much more regular upheaval) is using Btrfs for snapshot/recovery, whereas my Leap 42.is ext4. So Leap boots faster than Tumblweed/Btrfs/Snapper, and Btrfs/Snapper requires more admin/monitoring than ext4 here. Ignoring Plasma, my gut feel is that Leap would be more stable, more reliable, snappier, and less admin overhead, for a normal user.
Of course Leap 42.3/Plasma should be an improvement over 42.2, everything crossed.
my 2¢
TW is a rolling distro always the newest libraries always the latest apps
LEAP is based on SLE and it’s almost a commercial grade distro
regarding graphic cards neither LEAP nore TW include nvidia drivers you need to install them on your own it’s just that there are prebuild drivers for LEAP which are easier to install and keep updated
IMO LEAP is better suited to regular users TW to developers and tinkerers.
that being said you can easily install the nvidia run driver on TW or get the latest plasma 5/Qt release for LEAP
being a rolling distro updates are frequent and relatively large TW is basically a new OS every week or two that scares some people
at the end it’s your choice you can install them both in a VM to try them out or have a multibood setup you can even reuse your home and swap partitions.
me I’ve been using stable releases since SuSe 9.1 (I think) that’s before the openSUSE project started and am currently on LEAP 42.2 I don’t plan on switching to TW mostly because of lack of nvidia rpm driver but the frequency of the updates is an issue too, I have relatively older hardware and plasma 5 runs smooth for me.
and not at the end of life.