Hi, I’m struggling with the new 16.0 installer, and am looking for alternatives. Yesterday I installed Thumbleweed in a spare box and was agreeably surprised that it is still using Yast. As I use my Leap 15.6/KDE box with a rtx 5060 GPU for work and gaming (the others have weaker/or integrated graphics), I’m thinking if slowroll wouldn’t be a good fit.
Work is CAD (BricsCAD), structural analysis on virtualbox VMs, libreoffice, e-mail (thunderbird), firefox and the usual. The non-work part is basically Steam games.
I use a couple appimages but (still) don’t feel comfortable with flatpak or snaps that require a backend running (yes, I know, I’m a dinosaur, but I feel that these github/flathub packages are more vulnerable than those on the official repos).
Also, how long will thumbleweed and slowroll keep using yast?
I’ve also noted that some packages available in leap oss repos, like barrier, appear on experimental repos only in thumbleweed. Is there a significant reduction in package availability/stability compared to Leap 15/6/16.0?
What do you think? What’s your experience with slowroll? Please share!
Thanks
It’s well known that YaST is on the way out for all openSUSE distros. There are numerous posts in all the distro categories (including TW) forums…
Official openSUSE team members might have a firm date, but YaST is dated. Check Leap 16 … YaST is already removed and replaced by Myrlyn and Cockpit (ooops , and Agama for installation).
Leap (16.0 and beyond) and Tumbleweed have different philosophies underneath and different use cases and I would not choose just because “you are struggling with the installer”.
Leap is (almost) corporate grade (well, now that some initial kinks have been straightened out 
) while Tumbleweed is cutting edge and while I had no show stopper in years, the occasional snag is still there, a new kernel almost weekly takes its toll and you need some discipline with upgrades and browse the Forums or the Factory mailing list to keep safe and occasionally you still must be prepared to get your hands dirty.
Slowroll gets a big update monthly, so you can relax a bit, but basically is a monthly snapshot of Tumbleweed with bugfixes in between so you cannot count on the two years of stability that Leap offers.
So I would not deploy 100 TW in an office, but I’m OK with my home systems on TW.
Think about your real needs, then ask here if you still struggle with the installer!
Re: YaST, don’t base your choice on that. Most modules already don’t work or are not needed, some use dated defaults and are not going to be updated (e.g. Users), some offer only a partial view (e.g. System Services) and the important ones have valid alternatives in Myrlyn (Software and repositories) or Cockpit.
Re. package availability, Tumbleweed has the widest choice, since Slowroll is a monthly copy and Leap takes a selection of sources from Tumbleweed once a year or so.
Whether you prefer the bleeding versions from Tumbleweed or the cooked-by-SUSE versions of the system packages in Leap is another matter.
Thank you for your input, that was very useful.
My main problem now is using steam in Leap 16. This is my main box (the fastest CPU and GPU), and I’d like to keep using Steam on it. I installed Steam in Thumbleweed (no flatpak) without issues, but I understand TW is not for (my) production.
This box dual-boot with windos10 (on extended support), and I had Steam on it on Leap 15.6 for a couple of games that won’t run on linux (or at least they didn’t, I haven’t checked recently), but after some woes I’ve been unable to install Steam (see Nvidia + Steam 32 bit woes after system reinstall ).
I could use w10 for all steam games, but this box is also a linux media server that my wife sometimes use while I’m gaming.
So that’s a conundrum for me 
I’m aware that I’ll have to let go of Yast (from my dead, blackened hands), but really, agama’s partitioner is not good enough for dealing with all want-to-keep partitions in this box, including efi and windows. At least that was my perception when I tried to install Leap 16.0 on this box. Oh well…
Perhaps it will help from here:
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/games:tools/steam ?
Thread should have been labeled a “Game / Steam”, as the real focus is obviously about “Steam / gaming”, not YaST. 