3 Months on Tumbleweed. What I’ve done, learned, and realized.
TL;DR: I hopped into Tumbleweed thinking I could manage maintaining a rolling release. I was wrong and I’m going to switch to something more stable for the time being. I hope to come back to a rolling release someday when I’m actually ready and know what I’m doing.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back in June, I switched my daily laptop to use Mint instead of Windows 11. It was an old HP laptop with 8GB of RAM and screamed bloody murder on Windows, so I went over to Mint.
Fast forward a month, I wanted to do the same on my desktop PC since Windows 10 would no longer be officially supported in October. Since I do work and gaming on my PC, I thought Bazzite might be the right choice. So I installed it on a separate SSD and off I went! My games seemed to work for the most part, and my Nvidia GPU didn’t have any major issues, so I was happy…except for the fans. I couldn’t control the fan curves of my PC fans in Bazzite. I tried using the BIOS fan-curving software, but that didn’t take for some reason. After researching, I discovered I needed a kernel module for my motherboard’s fan headers to be installed. However, Bazzite, being immutable, wouldn’t allow me to do so.
Here starts my journey with Tumbleweed. In searching for a way to implement the kernel module in Bazzite, a user on the CoolerControl Discord suggested I give Tumbleweed a go, because,“if you know what you’re doing, it’s just what you need”: a rock solid workstation with gaming capabilities and low-level interactions allowed at all times. I thought, sure, I can do this. I’ve done LFS, I’ve built Gentoo in a VM, I ran Mint on my laptop with no issues, why not?
Hubris.
I booted into Tumbleweed, got the drivers for Nvidia installed, got Snapper up and running, and installed that kernel module for my fans like I’d been built for it. I tried some games, they seemed to work alright, and I thought I was set. Then the drivers broke. Or something like that. Basically, I did a zypper dup one day and managed to get a mismatch of drivers installed on my system, thus breaking everything. So I rolled back.
Over the next couple of months, more would happen: Spotify created ghost Singleton.lock files that needed to be deleted every so often for some reason, Pipewire worked fine in all my regular applications but didn’t work in the Bitwig Studio DAW (only JACK worked there for some reason), and I would put my computer to sleep, wake it back up, and everything would be slow as molasses.
On more than one occasion, I would launch a game and said game would only load my integrated graphics, not my discrete GPU. One time playing Overwatch, the whole system froze then hard crashed. I booted it up, went into the tty (the desktop environment wouldn’t load) and rolled back. Since then, I’ve had micro-stuttering in applications (mostly browsers, mouse and keyboard inputs won’t register for 2-30 seconds at a time), audio getting garbled in my DAW for some reason, multiple rollbacks, and a slew of other issues I’ve probably forgotten about at this point.
Now, I realize I WAS NOT ready for this. Linux has been a hobby for me the past 3 years, used for cybersecurity stuff (school club Capture the Flag events, not anything real or impactful), school assignments (WSL), and the occasional project (LFS and Gentoo in virtual machines). But making it my desktop? I had never dove so deep before and I barely managed to surface by the end.
There are plenty of great things though. The system (when it didn’t micro-stutter) was lightning fast. I got to really understand what the differences in repositories, package managers, sandboxing, and containerization were. And I discovered some issues I probably wouldn’t have seen on Windows, like my GPU emergency shutting off due to my power supply being maxed out when the VRAM got overflowed. All in all, I got into Tumbleweed because I thought I was better at this kind of stuff than I really was (or really am), and now I think I’m going to take the time to find something else for me to use that’s stable. Currently I’m debating Kubuntu, Pop_OS, Fedora Workstation, and good ol’ Mint as replacements for my desktop.
I honestly hope that someday I will be able to come back to Tumbleweed or some other rolling release. Because I genuinely DID have fun using it! More than the novelty of being on something besides Windows, the number of options I had was really cool. I could install something as a Flatpak, or use zypper, or use boxbuddy for a sandboxed version that only ran on Ubuntu, or use Bottles for Windows software. It felt really nice to update my computer and SEE the update, like, exactly what was being added and subtracted. For all the grief they gave me, messing with the Nvidia drivers and getting them to work (shoutout this very forum) gave me a level of satisfaction and accomplishment that I’ve not felt since I was a kid discovering computers for the first time. In short, Tumbleweed is wonderful, and I bet all its cousins in the *nix world of rolling releases offer similar challenges and benefits. But for now, I’m going to go with whatever is boring and stable. Cause I can’t have Zoom crash during a meeting with my project team and professors again.