Hi, I have been trying to catch up with things in the opensuse world.
With MicroOS/Aeon using containers and flatpaks for services and apps, I’m asking if it’s the aim to remove tumbleweed and it’s repos in the foreseeable future?
Thanks.
@kitman Nope, Tumbleweed is there for good… MicroOS will become the future when Leap reaches EOL in a few years, unless the Community creates something…
ah good. I’ve become more comfortable with the bleeding edge since I read the snapper manual 
Thanks.
I certainly don’t have the insider information like many of the experts here (such as malcolmlewis 
), but I thought I’d drop in for a quick reply.
I can’t see TW going away - I perceive it as sort of “what the future versions of other SuSE operating systems will be” … this might sound rwong, but it’s like the proving ground of the future.
Anyway, my other comment is about MicroOS … I was curious about it and want to see what it’s all about. So, here I am, right now, typing this in my virtual MicroOS (on my laptop, running TW as Host and MicroOS in a VirtualBox VM, the KDE Plasma version).
So far, MicroOS is pretty cool !!
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Groovy. I’ve got MicroOS lined up to play with in a VM soon…after I’ve sorted out the idiosyncrasies of Flatpak 
"Experience makes you wise. I now rely on openSUSE’s perpetual support for Tumbleweed. The system runs with btrfs. So far all my attempts to corrupt a btrfs have failed. It seems to be granted eternal life.
A new system is put together in the blink of an eye: Linux has grown up."
Kudos to the developers!
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I use Aeon/Micro OS as my daily desktop running Gnome. Love it!
Get it, set it and forget it. I have finally found my almost perfect distro. It caters to my lazy man “Maynard G Krebs” persona. It does all the maintenance… period. I don’t have to do anything. Nice.
Very snappy. A learning curve for sure but not that big of one.
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No, Tumbleweed isn’t going anywhere. It’s the upstream for both Aeon and Kalpa.
If anybody is discussing replacing Tumbleweed with something else from a development perspective, they’re playing their cards real close to the chest, and aren’t telling anybody.
Which is to say, no, it’s not even being discussed, as it’s not got any basis in reality.
This topic belongs to Open Chat, not to technical support section of this forum.
Topic moved to Open Chat.
To @aggie and @iamjiwjr … thanks for the brief overview and opinion !
I’ve got four TW machines (2 desktops, 2 laptops) … would be nice to convert one of each to MicroOS K/Plasma - that way, I’d have two machines that would be less “hands-on”.
I’ll first run in a VirtualBox to see how it goes
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Sorry.
Thanks.
OK I’ve had a quick play of the Alpha KDE on MicroOS in VM. Have to say I’m not overly impressed especially with Flatpaks and not having XFCE. I’ll play more later. But I guess I have been spoiled by using Yast and Zypper under XFCE over the years with tumbleweed.
But this leads me to ask what I missed asking originally - what is the future of package RPMs in tumbleweed?
I would hate to think maintainers drop RPMs in favour of dev’s flatpaks. I’ve played with flatpak apps for a week now, gotten around the theming issues (but not all!!), but still have some pipewire issues.
If RPMs disappeared over night I would go back to git cloning app’s source code and compiling locally - seriously.
Thanks.
I’m not expecting any change in that.
Basically, Tumbleweed is the testing grounds for SuSE Enterprise.
Long term, however, it is harder to predict. There has been a trend toward increased use of containers. And that trend is likely to continue. And we should expect Tumbleweed to be affected by that trend.
We don’t have enough maintainers, for the number of RPM packages that need to be maintained. This is a long-standing issue, that affects all distributions, not just openSUSE. If you’re concerned about RPM’s getting dropped in favour of flatpaks, then get involved, and learn how to maintain the packages that concern you.
Flatpak, at least as currently offered, is only concerned with End-User facing desktop applications, and won’t ever replace the low-level things (I highly doubt you’ll ever see anybody trying to twist the flatpak packaging to provide the Linux Kernel, or systemd, or dracut, for instance), so those things will most likely remain RPM, DEB, TGZ, or whatever format it is a particular distribution has chosen to base their software management around.
Flatpak, as currently offered, is only concerned with User-Facing desktop applications, which are the ones that produce some of the highest amount of user complaints/bugs filed/etc, and require some of the highest amount of Maintainer attention to handle. Flatpak spreads the load, assuming that you’re pulling from a shared repository like Flathub, and benefits everybody, as in an ideal situation, it makes the pipeline from the upstream shorter to the desktop.
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As you wrote, I’m experiencing my first challenge with MicroOS right now (at a low level). I have it running as a VM (v-Box) to test it. I want to install the VBoxGuestAdditions (inside the MicroOS guest vm), as in:
# sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
Verifying archive integrity... 100% MD5 checksums are OK. All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox 7.0.0_BETA3 Guest Additions for Linux 100%
bzip2 not found. Please install: bzip2 tar; and try again.
There ya go … the default MicroOS doesn’t include bzip2 (and it’s required library files!). MicroOS does have gzip:
# which gzip
/usr/bin/gzip
… so I will check the script code inside the VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
script and compressed image file. (rolls eyes).
shrugs sudo transactional-update pkg in bzip2 Reboot, and proceed, if you’ve got to have Virtualbox.
One thing to consider … @aggie … is that µOS is an immutable (read-only) operating system, so that V’Box script is probably going to attempt to write files and won’t be able to
Though, I might be rwong 
I agree.
Isn’t there a distinction between a maintainer and a dev? I saw a maintainer as someone who picks up a dev’s source code - via github/gitlab etc - and packages it for a specific OS. Any bugs with app is not the maintainer’s fault but should be reported to the dev. That is unless the RPM is faulty which as far as I have experienced has rarely happened.
But then as for maintaining up to date RPMs isn’t that what Open Build Services is for? I thought that is an automated process but still owned by a maintainer. (I must get into playing with OBS one day).
As far as Flatpaks are concerned I never saw them for OS related stuff, only just for user land apps like firefox, libreoffice etc. Services under immutable OS would I assume be available via containers.
But right now I need to find out why Flatpak screwed my desktop’s XFCE theme. A new thread coming up 