Hi guys, I’m considering replacing my Leap installion with Tumbleweed.
Unfortunately I’m running a Optimus laptop. It took quite a while to get my NVIDIA card to work in Leap. As far as I understand, the downside of switching to Tumbleweed is that Kernel / X11 / dev may break NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Unfortunately Noveau doesn’t cut it for me (I have a GTX 1070 and Noveau is basically making it slower than my integrated Intel Graphics). So I guess that I’m stuck with Proprietary drivers and having to often reinstall the drivers or rollback new updates.
Due to that I was thinking about adopting a “lazy” update schedule… I don’t know, maybe running zypper dup every couple of weeks or so (I know, terrible practice in terms of security).
I’m wonder how often Tumbleweed users run zypper dup and how often should I expect NVIDIA drivers to break.
Do you update your system daily? What’s your policy towards NVIDIA drivers? Should I even consider Tumbleweed with proprietary drivers?
If you don’t mind recompiling and getting the occasional break that requires patching nvidia or a new kernel. Unless you have a very special need for TW, in your place I’d really stay with LEAP.
That’s the thing, I don’t really have a special need, just feel like jumping on the rolling release bandwagon :D. I mean Plasms 5.11 would be really nice (I’ve added KDE repos to Leap 42.3 but the result was quite instable and I’ve ended up going back to LTS), new Kernel would be nice, not having so many third party repos to get new software would also be nice, but none of those things are really essential.
A colleague told me that Manjaro does a superb job with NVDIA Optimus (as in, he claims that it was an “install and forget” experience). I guess that I’m chasing the stable rolling release unicorn in Gecko land :D.
Back to the original question, I’m really curious about how often typical Tumbleweed users update their systems. Is anyone actually updating the system / reinstalling NVIDIA “the hard way” on a daily basis? Or are people only updating once or times a month? Anyone updating weekly? How often does an update break your DE?
That’s the thing, I don’t really have a special need, just feel like jumping on the rolling release bandwagon :D. I mean Plasma 5.11 would be really nice (I’ve added KDE repos to Leap 42.3 but the result was quite instable and I’ve ended up going back to LTS), new Kernel would be nice, not having so many third party repos to get new software would also be nice, but none of those things are really essential.
A colleague told me that Manjaro does a superb job with NVDIA Optimus (he claims that it was an “install and forget” experience). I guess that I’m chasing the stable rolling release unicorn in Gecko land :D.
Back to my original question, I’m really curious about how often typical Tumbleweed users update their systems. Is anyone actually updating the system / reinstalling NVIDIA “the hard way” on a daily basis? Or are people only updating once or times a month? Anyone updating weekly? How often does an update break your DE?
Back to your original question, I’m not a TW user, so what I know is second-hand, gathered from posts on this site. If I had to guess, I’d say weekly updates and monthly break-downs, on the average. But that’s just my feeling - which keeps me on LEAP, thank you
I’ve seen a few posts of people quitting TW after trying to use it in production systems, due to the (much) larger maintenance time required.
I moved to Tubleweed after 13.2 support ended and had the only problem I had booting since then was due to a lack of disk space, but deleting some snapshots I could continue. Also I had to start once or twice two times as the first time was not successful. As the second time was successful, that does not count as break.
My system does use Intel integrated graphics, so no idea how stable the NVIDIA drivers on Tubleweed are, you might want to do a search on the forum to see how many problems are posted.
I do my updates typically in the weekend, if something breaks, better in the weekend then I have time to look into it.
That’s good to know. So it looks like life can be good on TW If you stick with Intel pipeline. That’s basically my experience with Leap as well. Since I’ve installed Bumblebee and leveraging Intel drivers 99% things rarely crash. I’m also more used with Brtfs by now (nothing fancy but I do remove old snapshots manually once in a while and make sure not to touch the computer when Brtfs rebalance is running is the background).
I wish there was a way to have two Grub entries, one for Intel and one for Nvidia. That would convenient for TW.
Updating is easy. So, I do it whenever I see they are available. But, I check the forum first; looking to see if the pending update has caused problems.
Yes, Tumbleweed fine on intel graphics (8 year-old M45 integated type). Intermittent desktop freezes with Leap 42.x + KDE (Xfce always ok though), still irritating and usually cleared by a forced logout.
Tumbleweed had that same issue when at Plasma 5.8.x, but upgraded and fixed by the time Leap 42.1 released and has been extremely reliable since. It’s a pity for Leap, given it’s stable otherwise with good performance. I turned to Xfce on 42.1 temporarily to avoid the Plasma freezes and some other early issues, and a lighter fast performer on the 8 year-old laptop. Excellent Manjaro XFCE Edition (mainstream for them) now installed in the multiboot, quick to boot and testing positively so far. It rolls less frequently than TW, and with lighter downloads. Yet release levels of main system components and applications are similar or equal to TW, some are newer. Their KDE Edition looks ok, but only viewed as liveMedia in VBox.
My Tumbleweed with Btrfs is updated more regularly than weekly, since TW first started. Bear in mind TW is targeted by openSUSE at devs, packagers and sysadmins, who really need to work with latest upstream releases. Bear in mind that the release manager has stated a desire to have daily snapshots i.e. seven per week, and more. Typically snapshot downloads now contain the lower hundreds (1-5) of individual packages, and occasionally the higher hundreds, even a 900+ and over 1,000 but those are rare. Going to weekly upgrading may save a few kernel updates and some others that get repeated, but the upgrades will be much larger than daily snapshot downloads, and so will the Btrfs snapshot sizes.
Stayed with Btrfs and snapshots on Tumbleweed (never on Leap) to mitigate the inherent instability of a heavily rolling release. However, reliability has been so good that only twice in 2-3 years have I needed to recover the system using a previous snapshot, and one of those was a broken download self-inflicted. I’m not sure it justifies the Btrfs overhead on booting and snapshot maintenance with every upgrade. It slows the system with the disk light almost constantly on for minutes. If I need to re-install TW or even lighter rolling release such as Manjaro, I will use ext4 or whatever which not get in the way of using everyday applications.
I switched over to Tumbleweed about a week or two ago, and I let it upgrade every day. Having switched from Arch, I know that if you let a rolling release distro get too far behind, you’ll break more. So, counter-intuitively perhaps, you need to be upgrading MORE often to see more stability. It’s like a motorcycle, the faster you go, the more stable you are. The main reason to use a rolling release in the first place is to get cutting-edge upgrades to all your packages immediately.
