New to Opensuse and this forum, so please tell me if I’m doing something wrong.
Decided to explore a bit the Leap 16, check if will play nice with my machines. For now, I have installed it in a virtual machine to check if all my apps are working as expected.
Because my machines are rather 2025 hardware (ryzen 9070 & ryzen 350), I tought that kernel 6.12 would do fine, but a newer one would do even better. Found this guide:
I tought 6.18 is kind of new, it’s LTS, let me try that.
Did not expect this at all, afaik 7.0.0 was just released a few days ago.
Anyway, everything is working on the virtual machine, all my applications function normally. My questions are:
If I install Leap 16 with the 7.0.0 kernel on my laptop and desktop, would I have any issues? Can anything break? Is it the best practice to get the most recent kernel or to just stick to the default one that is coming with 6.0?
Basically Leap is for those who do NOT want the newest of the newest, but want an environment as stable (in: not changing things) as possible.
Thus everything you do beyond the standard repo goes outside that policy. Which will not say it would not"work". But it is all up to you.
Kernel:stable:((backports) for Leap) includes always the newest stable kernel.
And this is now kewrnel 7.0
At the time, the article was written, kernel 6.18 was the stable one.
Nobody cxan say, ift kernel 7.0 is working correctly with your Hardware.
But as @hcvv has written, why Leap and not Tumbleweed?
Adding to that, following that guide you apparently added the Kernel_stable_backport repo, which always hosts the “current” kernel from kernel.org, currently 7.0.0.
That is usually for developers and early testers, so not for ordinary users.
If you need the bleeding edge try Tumbleweed. By the way, kernel 7.0.0 is not in Tumbleweed either, yet (unless you add the Kernel_stable repo, of course…).
Actually tw was the first one that landed on my desktop. Was new to linux, so faced some issues that i think now i know how to handle. Will try again, have to just carve out the time to do it.
OK, there might be some misunderstanding about what openSUSE considers “stable”.
At the time of writing this kernel.org reports “mainline” at 7.0 and “stable” at 6.19.12 that, BTW, is what is currently in Tumbleweed.
Unless I missed something, Kernel:Head offers even RC releases, definitely not for production.
Hi @GabeC Cracking hardware to run Linux/openSuse by the way. Your graphics and memory did look kind of odd though. From my impression I feel like with your system and your knowledge you’d have been more comfortable with Tumbleweed, just a thought not insisting.
You know I was rather surprised to see you could even get Leap with 7.0.0 on a fresh install, to give you a perspective I’m on 6.12.0-160000.28.1 and it works without issue I just take what ever they provide basically. I guess the only problem that I found with Leap is that a few of the apps like multimedia or a browser like Firefox retain and older but supposedly more stable version. I don’t really buy that so I just install a bunch of apps via flatpak/flathub and it seems to work okay.
To update the system it’s ‘sudo zypper refresh’ and It’s ‘sudo zypper up’ and not ‘zypper dup’, I didn’t realise that initially.
I tested in a vm. Was laughing in my head, thinking it’s going to crash so fast, it will not even reach the desktop. Instead, it booted normally and everything worked.
Anyway, it would be a dif story if I would have done that on one of my machines, I guess.
The reason for Leap and not TW, is that I was testing for this config:
main desktop: TW, everything up to date, new drivers, new app versions, etc. It’s the machine I’m working on, so needs to be superstable during the day for work, and game on it during night.
main laptop: I’m thinking Slowroll, so that I can take full advantage of the hardware (a rather recent ryzen 350). Ideally, Kalpa will fit the bill quite nicely, but Kalpa is alpha, and I do not do alpha or beta (I think Aeon is in RC since 2 years ago, Kalpa didn’t even reach beta).
media PC: a small nuc (rather old) - this would be my test bed, so something like Leap/Slowroll with testing kernels/other stuff to see if working before doing it on my other machines.
Currently, all 3 machines have fedora. Normal kde 43 for desktop, Kinoite for laptop, a light server for the media PC (to test stuff out). Once Kalpa gets out of beta, will consider switching all to opensuse.
