OpenSUSE on production desktops : Leap vs. Tumbleweed ?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,

I’ve been using OpenSUSE Leap KDE for the last two years on all desktop clients, and I’m quite happy with it. It runs in my office, in our local school and on my client’s machines. For the most part, I started with Leap 15.0 and upgraded directly to 15.1.

I wonder if Tumbleweed could do the job equally well while eventually solving some issues. How robust is it for daily use? I’d be curious to have your advice on that if you’re using it. (I started on Slackware 7.1 back in 2001 and used Gentoo in 2002 so I’m used to RTFM and getting my hands dirty.)

Cheers from the south french quarantine.

2

Your mention of southern France distracted me for a sec with happy memories as we are presently in lock down in Scottish highlands, but I digress.
I am not a coder but have been using openSUSE since version 8 and have progressed through every step to Leap 15.1 without any serious issues other than grief with KDE and these mostly my fault.

I changed to TW over a year ago and again no problems as in most cases issues are fixed promptly but there are very many updates, usually daily, requiring logging out and back in and often requiring reboots. Not been a problem for me in a soho environment but this could have a bearing on your work environment, depending on the applications you are running, as rebooting can be quite disruptive in a network clustered environment. Just my thoughts. Hope this helps.

Regards,
Budge

3

Thanks for the detailed reply.

A little follow-up question concerning updates.

With OpenSUSE Leap updates are manageable. Meaning I get a reasonable amount of updates, and roughly once a year I’m performing a major update to the next version.

So over a period of, say two years, are there more updates to Tumbleweed than to Leap including the dist-upgrades ?

4

Hi
I would suggest sticking with the Leap releases, upgrading to the next release is much easy to manage these days. With Tumbleweed, there is no updating it’s a new release every time via zypper dup (three in the last week), I use it as my primary desktop, but anything running services is Leap based.

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OK thanks very much for the clarification. I’ll happily stick with Leap then.

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I am using Leap + updating some stuff for a new hardware: Mesa 3D, Firefox, kernel, …

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Frequent updates need not be quite so disruptive as this language suggests.

Nearly every dup will include one or more packages with a notice that reboot is required. What it doesn’t say is required to become effective, which IMO is what it means. Taking effect immediately isn’t mandatory. At least, I’ve never had a problem with continuing without booting immediately after dup completes.

With kernels, keep on using the kernel you are running. There’s no hurry for an ordinary user to get the very latest kernel installed the instant it becomes available. Keep the kernel locked, and you can go without rebooting for many many dups, long enough that you can stick with a kernel until its major version changes, e.g., like me in some cases, keep on running 5.5.13 until 5.6 stops increasing minor versions, and install only the last before the switch to 5.7.

If you have a problem only TW can conveniently solve, frequent upgrades need not be such a disruptive impediment to its use.

The biggest drawback IMO is that it’s best to dup from multi-user.target or at least logged out of X, which is not that big a thing for me, since it flushes a lot of stale stuff from disk cache. To a point, the more frequent the dup, the quicker it completes.

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I want to add some notes to this, skip the advice to reboot (or restart a program) when updated.

While Unix/Linux is quite forgivable in this aspect. it is not imune.

Background.
When a file is deleted/removed in Unix/Linux, it’s entry in the directory is removed. But the data space is only given free when the usage count of the files is 0 (zero). Thus when that file is open (one or more times) at that moment, the contents is not lost. In other words, as long as an executable is still running (file open by the kernel), it will happily run on, when needed even loading memory pages from that (now deleted) file.

When, in the mean time, a newer version of that file (executable program) is installed, a new start of that program will use the new contents. So at the same time, two proceses of the same program can be active, each one running a different version.

Now this helps a lot in not breaking already running processes. But it has it’s limits. Programs may use several files for e.g. modules that are loaded on need. The kernel is of course the most important example, but there are more. And then comes the problem that the interface between these different files (modules), might not be consistent between different versions. The program (e.g. the kernel) might not break immediatly, but a problem can surrface at every moment.

That is why specialy on kernel updates a reboot asap is strongly advised and IMHO should not be ignored.

Personal experience is that on more then one time after a Firefox update, the running Firefox I still had refused to open new tabs/windows or showed other strange behaviour. Simply quiting Firefox and starting a new one helped.

I can add I am running Leap, where,as explained, the updates are much smaller and less frequent then the distribution updates on TW (where several people advise to do them without the GUI running, or even in run level 1).

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If you are logged into Plasma (i.e. KDE), and there is a major Plasma update there can be problems. Presumably there’s a similar issue for other desktops.

I usually do updates from Icewm, to minimize these problems.

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I apologise in advance but I did not want start a new thread. I only want to put somewhere a few points about my migration from Leap to Tumbleweed. And this thread seems to be suitable.

I has been a long-time Leap user. I preferred it to Tumbleweed. Sometimes I used to download KDE live Tubleweed and had a look how it looked like. I has always been KDE follower.
But recent weeks I noticed that my notebook wifi connection is not stable. Randomly it crashed and recovered back. It was not often, but it was annoying.
My notebook is HP 470 G7, bought this summer. I still have also former Windows there. I tried wifi under Windows and it was working without a problem.
I decided to have a try under KDE live Tumbleweed. Wifi again was working stable. So I replaced Leap with Tumbleweed.
Not only wifi is satisfied but I see that KDE is much more better/newer compared with that one in Leap. For example Wayland is also much more usable.

So to sum it up, I don’t know why I’ve hesitated with Tumbleweed so far.

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Leap every time, except in my case :slight_smile:

Leap is so easy to upgrade to the next incarnation anyway and it’s rock solid

I just like life on the edge