I’ve got a simple question. I’ve been using Tumbleweed for about 6 months on my AMD Ryzen 7 laptop with 40GB ram and Gnome Wayland. My setup is very simple; I just do web browsing, some simple word processing and spreadsheets, virt-manager VMs, Syncthing, FreeFileSync and Pihole in a podman container (done by a Linux admin). That’s about it. No games, no coding, no IDEs and no video editing.
I run sudo zypper dup every day. In the 6 months of daily updates, only once has an update caused any problems with my system that required a snapshot rollback.
Does that sound normal for only one issue in that time? Or sound unusual?
Do some of you experience lots of update issues that need rollbacks or fixing?
Have some of you very rarely or never had an issue with an update?
Just curious. I’m a noob and relatively new to Linux and Tumbleweed, so this will help me get a better intuitive feel for it’s stability. I can image other noobs curious about Tumbleweed would find this info helpful.
I’m guessing that having a complex setup with lots of big complex apps makes it more unstable.
What is the biggest thing that can make Tumbleweed unstable when updating?
First, “update” is a term that never appropriately applies to TW. It can only be upgraded. Each release is considered a new distribution. Trying to merely update it, as is done in openSUSE Leap, can prime the pump for otherwise inexplicable havoc.
Second biggest way to destabilize is to add some random non-standard repo providing some app that you searched the web for instead of searching standard repos for. Optional repos should be added only with due caution, preferably coached by those with experience until you’ve accumulated your own.
Those with neither hybrid graphics nor NVidia graphics tend to have an easier life. My own experience started with the onset of the gestation period of TW. It includes no ability to rollback, as I’m using only EXTx filesystems. Breakage I can’t fix in short order is relatively uncommon, so the ability to rollback isn’t missed here.
I used DOS/Windows for 35 yrs so I built up a lot of troubleshooting experience there. I’m now slowly doing that with Linux. In general, I’ve found that troubleshooting issues on Linux is more difficult than Windows, and requires a pretty high level of knowledge.
Interesting, the biggest reason I moved from Ubuntu to TW was to get away from EXT4 and use Btrfs rollbacks with noob-friendly GUI apps to manage snapshots.
I guess the single rollback you needed was related to the recent Mesa upgrade that jeopardized AMD graphics, so you were unlucky here since such disasters are very rare.
I just upgrade once a week or so, there is normally no need for daily upgrades unless security is compromised, and I follow the Forum and the mailing list here so if disasters show up I can defer upgrading until we know what is happening.
That way I didn’t have any showstopper in years and so no need to rollback (still happy EXT4 user here).
IMHO troubleshooting in Linux is not more difficult, just different from Win*, and I understand that coming from 35 yrs with Win you feel that way.
But, TBH, do you have a free support channel like this Forum in the Win* world?
There is a saying: "Whenever you go using Unix/Linux, forget everything you learned about computing when using MS Windows ".
That is of course an exaggeration, but you should really be ware of people using the same terms for different things, basics being very different, attitudes being different, etc., etc.
There are several reasons I stick to EXTx. One is that all my systems are multiboot. A couple of them have accumulated more than 50 installations, all on one HDD. Many installations are years beyond their support lifetimes. A number of them still have 11.4 on them. Virtually all that I had when 13.1 was new, none of which UEFI or GPT, still have 13.1, and the installations on them are booted via 13.1’s Grub Legacy. In this environment, backward compatibility has a heightened role. BTRFS would violate that.
A more significant one is the ease of rollback can alter mindset, making it easy to ignore a problem, rather than taking the time to assess it, and if necessary bring it to a bug tracker, or confirm or deny existing bug report reproducibility, or simply add information to a report. Most developers spend little to no time in forums. Actual software problems that don’t reach the bug tracker(s) don’t often get fixed except by accident.
I have never needed to rollback – which is fortunate because I’m using “ext4” so there isn’t a rollback option.
I occasionally see conflicts, but I have been able to resolve those satisfactorily. Tumbleweed is very stable. But note that I mainly use Leap, though I do have Tumbleweed installed.
I like it. The thrill of walking the computing tightrope without a net. But if you got some cloned or image backups you can probably recover pretty easily.
So after reading the replies the summary is it seems that sudo zypper dup rarely causes issues, especially if the setup is pretty simple, like mine is.
