A while ago I moved from Fedora to openSUSE Leap as my experience of Fedora with Plasma 5 was not good. Leap has been much better but I am finding now that it has several products way behind the current stable releases and I am starting to have issues with some which I dont seem to be able to resolve. In addition trying to update to the latest current stable releases on Leap causes so many issues with additional repos installed and in turn cuases problems because some parts wont update because others are not available it is becoming a mess.
So what I am looking for is which openSUSE release should I move to? I want something which is reasonably stable but should have pretty much be upgradable to the current stable release of all its components without having to resort to installing many and varied repos which dont always line up. The options are 13.2 or Tumbleweed as I see it but Tumbleweed is a rolling release which seems to me to indicate a bleeding edge release and may well not be very stable and 13.2 when I look suggests it is not a current release and nothing I have seen shows me how long it is likely to be supported for.
So how should I move forward? Is there an easy way to upgrade Leap so I dont need all these repos and can use the latest stable release of all components? If I move to 13.2 will I achieve what I need? If I install Tumbleweed how stable will it be?
openSUSE 13.2 - will be maintained until 2 months after release of Leap 42.2 (EXPECTED First Quarter of 2017)
Leap 42.1 - will be maintained until 6 months after 42.2 (EXPECTED Second Quarter of 2017)
I think that Tumbleweed is too dynamic for you. You could stick with 13.2 if you want to minimise your encounters with Plasma 5 development. You could stick with 13.2 until Leap 42.1 reaches the end somewhere in mid 2017 and “leap” right over Leap 42.1 entirely, to land on/in Leap 42.2. By then any issues you had with Plasma 5 should not be there to test you any more.
Thanks for the info. My problem is that Leap is already well back on some programs current stable release and I dont know if 13.2 will have these or not, if Leap does not what are the chances of 13.2 having them. One current issue I have is with Samba which is 4.2.4 on Leap but current stable is I believe 4.4 which may or may not fix the issue I dont know yet, but trying to test it means yet another repo needs to be added and then removed. I think that stable Samba is actually quite old so I dont know why it’s not in Leap anyway.
Hi
Perhaps you don’t quite understand the openSUSE release model? With an openSUSE release the bulk of packages stay at the same release but security (CVE’s etc) and some bug fixes fixes are back ported into the release versions, so version X.Y may not be the latest release from a version number, but from a security level it will be up to date with Y.Z.
Perhaps if you define your term ‘Stable’, I’m assuming you mean feature releases not security fixes?
I am starting to understand the model better now;-) My issue still is mainly with bugs in a release or perhaps it might be in a security update of a product or component, for example I have been fighting against a Samba issue which only appears in 4.2.4-15.1 and since 4.2.4 is the only thing I can find in Samba I assume the -15.1 is a bug fix or security fix created by openSUSE developers. However I am unable to get anyone to take any notice of the reports, 4.2.4-12.1 works and I can downlevel it but then I have to mess around stopping updates putting 4.2.4-15.1 back on again. In other cases some newer versions have support or features I need and I find these are referred to as ‘stable’ by the product itself but I find no easy and straight forward way to install the later release without going the route of compiling or relying on anothers homemade repo.
Super stability is all well and good but this to me does seem overkill. Suprisingly Plasma 5 has not caused me huge issues, yes some minor problems but stuff I can live with, its products like Samba SMB4k kdenlive and a few others where either it is downlevel or the release provided by Leap does not work as well as a previous release used on a different base like Fedora.
I am still undecided as to which way to go. As I have a spare HDD I am installing Tumbleweed right now to dual boot with Leap.
Yes I know I can lock down Samba and have done in the past and yes I know no security updates but and its a big BUT the security update was the issue and has caused the problem which by the way still exists in Tumbleweed! Now I have both TW and Leap in dual boot so will see how it goes. As for my Samba issue I will open a bug now I have time.
Just to say that I have been using Tumbleweed now for a while and its been fine (apart from Samba issue but that’s not TW) so will stick with it and see how it goes. Large update today and no problems with it. I have Leap as a fall back on this PC as it dual boots, but so far not needed to use it at all.