I will get a new desktop in a few days. Nothing exstraordinary (Nvidia card, integrated RJ45 network card, printer that has Linux driver delivered…). I am a Leap user since the beginning (my first SuSE version was 6.3). I will install from scratch on this new PC and retrieve the data from the other one.
I am hesitating between Leap and Tumbleweed and would like your advice:
I heard Leap will be abandoned in a short future. Is that true?
If I select Tumbleweed over Leap, my understanding is this flavor has rolling upgrade, new packages… No issue with Nvidia drivers ? No issue with drivers in general (especially for the new printer, the driver is provided by the hardware manufacturer)
Is Tumbleweed fully compatible with the Steam client?
Also, I was very frustrated with the Brtfs file system. Would you recommend Ext4 or others as the main file system for / and for /home?
@Arnaudk93 Hi there
Leap will continue on with a likely 15.7… Unsure about Leap 16.x series status. But depending on the hardware (as in how new) AFAIK a lot of backporting has been done with the 6.4.x series kernel. If it’s a new Turing+ based card, there is the option to use the open driver as well.
The printer is Brother MFC-J5740DW. I will use RJ45/Ethernet, they provide their own drivers, I don’t think I will encounter issues.
Have you seen issues with Nvidia when using Tumbleweed? I mean, to quick update and Nvidia driver fails to follow/adjust? For the other hardware I don’t expect difficulty.
@Arnaudk93 Me personally on Tumbleweed have not had any issues with the Nvidia drivers for a long time. But I use the hardway with the open driver and no secure boot, it’s not my primary graphics gpu (I use Intel ARC) anymore, so just prime render offload.
I have Leap 15.6 with a Nvidia Tesla P4 running fine, again it’s a compute node, no graphics output…
If you scan threads here and on openSUSE mailing lists, you’ll find many are about NVidia drivers, delay between new TW kernel version and NVidia drivers that support it among the most frequent. Some people, like malcolmlewis, have learned a simple enough routine for dealing with it that works for them. Others have more trouble. Still others have moved to other brand GPUs. For me it would be quite simple - lock the kernel, so that upgrades do not automatically install new when available: sudo zypper addlock ‘kernel-de*’ ‘kernel-lo*’. Locks can be overridden and kernel specifically upgraded whenever working “easy way” drivers for prospective kernel have been confirmed available.
This has been the history anyway. The open NVidia drivers alternative to proprietary drivers or “experimental” FOSS drivers are rather new, and only for the newest products, so there’s not been a lot of experience with them shared as yet.
@mrmazda It depends on the AMD gpu, plus what the the end game is for it…
I’ve had good results for my Intel ARC considering no rebar or PCIe 4.0 slot, but my needs are simple, it does run oneAPI, hardware decode/encode works OTB, openCL 3.0 etc…
I have one additional question then: if I choose Leap instead (for stability) and I figure out this will be the last Leap version, how difficult will it be to upgrade to Tumbleweed in 3 or 4 years ?
The other option would be to keep /home intact (where the data are) and to install brand new Tumbleweed on /.
I am no expert. I use zypper for upgrade (zypper ref and zypper up) but I never had any issue with Nvidia proprietary drivers after an upgrade (I am rather happy with Nvidia cards for more than 15 years. Nvidia support on Linux is as good as on Windows. Intel simply does not support and let opensource community handle the drivers, that are rather unoptimized compared to the one on Windows, at least it was the case few years ago. For AMD, 5 years ago the proprietary drivers were not stable and the opensource one lacked of optimization. It may have changed since. I have children who play 3D games on Steam on my Linux box, that’s why I always chose Nvidia)
I know no way to predict whether so far in the future it might be more or less difficult than now. By installing TW afresh, along with keeping existing separate /home/ filesystem, it should remain simple enough for most users, just like now.
Man,
You’ll have to decide it by your self. If you really want stability, stay with leap. Later, when you won’t be able to use it any more (“…”), surely you could find another option that suits your necessities. Good luck!
@Arnaudk93, you have not indicated the kind of work you do? I am 15+ year user of openSUSE leap versions. I have explored dozens of other linux’ in vms and still stick with leap. I work mostly in science stuff.
But, if you do science work, e.g., astronomy, computational fluid dynamics, and similar things, you will likely run into issues running or trying to compile the most recent versions of science software in leap as the dependency versions needed by current packages are not sufficiently current in many cases. Upgrading major dependencies can become major work efforts in leap. This kind of work is best conducted in Tumbleweed as that will have newest dependencies.
I run TW in a vm for these reasons. I am considering an entire system change to TW but that is under evaluation.
I believe that for your use case you will be well served by Distrobox [1]. You can install/compile the software you need in it and add a entry to open the software directly from the system menu.
On “/” I recommend BRTFS, It eats a lot of space. My experience is to have ~80GB. It have save me a lot of time during the years to have the ability to boot a older version of “/”. Otherwise I’m using XFS.
I am a salesperson, still interested in computer science, but due to business and family reasons, not too much time to spend on it.
I have children. They play games on Steam. One also is a Python-geek and uses the computer for this. One child uses also the Linux machine for 3D modelling and video editing.
