Besides stability worries, the data volume TW updates produce has kept me away from it.
I´d like to know, what (do you estimate) is roughly the data volume TW updates require in a month?
I´d guess a gig minimum?
IIRC 2 or 3 years ago I tried TW for the last time, but every now and then something broke and I gave up on it.
Some people say it may be a bit more stable nowadays?
In a month, it should update most packages in a system. So if the total size of all .rpm are X GB, the data volume in a month is somewhat close to that.
But users usually update often, from daily to weekly. A daily update routine would yield a volume higher than that because of multiple updates for a given package, and a weekly routine would yield a volume somewhere in between because some updates were skipped. A totally unreliable non-scientific ballpark range would be from 1GB to 20GB. In short it will depend on how many packages to you have and how often will you update.
This might give an idea as well: https://review.tumbleweed.boombatower.com/
It lists all TW snapshots with the total size for all packages. Just have in mind that updates arriving in your system would be way smaller than that.
An update which yields a broken system (i.e. no GUI) might happen 1-2x an year. Minor services/apps breakages also happen more often than that, but not for all users, it depends what you have on your system. You should be prepared for when such things happen, the minimum would be how to rollback a BTRFS snapshot and how to boot a previous kernel version. There’s plenty of instructions on this forum.
If you are considering switching to TW you should balance its benefits against these potential issues.
Adding my 2 cents.
We recently had full rebuilds due to GCC switch and usr merge: when that happens most packages are rebuilt and you download up to 2-3 GB depending on what you have installed. These are usually announced on the factory mailing list well in advance: see https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/factory@lists.opensuse.org/2021/6/
Other “daily” snapshots download a few hundred MB, so if you update once a week a monthly download around 2GB is to be expected.
Catastrophic breakages are rare and produce noticeable activity on the Forums, so if you fear that keep an eye on the Forum activity and wait a couple of days before upgrading.
On two of my machines I run quarterly updates, which are a few GB at most. Obviously there are 8 months with no download at all.
IIRC 2 or 3 years ago I tried TW for the last time, but every now and then something broke and I gave up on it.
Some people say it may be a bit more stable nowadays?
Tumbleweed is rock solid now. Snapshot 20210527 was huge, but installed smoothly: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/554787-Snapshot-20210527-Usr-merge-and-compile-kernel-modules?p=3035454#post3035454
Of course your mileage will depend on many details. Stable hardware is a prerequisite for installing on btrfs. You will want to configure btrfsmaintenance properly. I installed daily upgrade notification by email and turned off the software update applet in the system tray. The one day delay prevents me from starting premature upgrades hitting the burst of activity caused by immediate notification of most users. Thus I get the maximum rated download speed of my FTTB / VDSL2 connection most of the time.
A valuable option is installing both Tumbleweed and Leap in parallel using a common home directory and keeping both up to date. Keep the other one as a well tested backup.
You will want to install latest Firefox on both systems:
**erlangen:~ #** zypper lr mozilla
Alias : mozilla
Name : Mozilla based projects (openSUSE_Tumbleweed)
URI : https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/
Enabled : Yes
GPG Check : (r ) Yes
Priority : 80 (raised priority)
Autorefresh : On
Keep Packages : Off
Type : rpm-md
GPG Key URI : https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/repodata/repomd.xml.key
Path Prefix :
Parent Service :
Keywords : ---
Repo Info Path : /etc/zypp/repos.d/mozilla.repo
MD Cache Path : /var/cache/zypp/raw/mozilla
**erlangen:~ #**
http://www.mistelberger.net/chillin.svg
I tested latest KDE on Leap 15.3 and it seems to work hassle-free: https://www.heise.de/forum/heise-online/Kommentare/openSUSE-Leap-15-3-SLE-Kompatibilitaet-Podman-vorsichtige-Software-Updates/Plasma-5-18-Mit-Copy-Paste-zu-Plasma-5-21-90/thread-6764517/
I tend to do weekly updates on my desktop and it doesn’t seem unusual to get 1-2GB. Sometimes it’s only in the 100s of MBs, but I’d say it’s rare that a week is under 300MB for me. But then I may be falling foul of confirmation bias because I notice the big ones and ignore the little ones 
I’ve found TW to be quite stable with updates. Very occasionally the proprietary NVidia drivers don’t rebuild for me, but a reinstall fixes that (I’ve still not worked out which command to run without reinstalling the package). The recent UsrMerge that people mention is causing me issues, but I suspect that’s my custom builds of some packages on OBS.
Thanx for all replies.
That helps a lot to make considerations.
If Leap was a bit less conservative, just some more major version updates for core stuff (like pulseaudio, KDE) that would make it perfect. Not as fast rolling as TW, but just a tad faster than it does now…
Hm, 8 months without any updates!? This is “never change a running system” taken to the extreme. Not afraid of security holes?
I keep a Leap installation on external USB HDD for certain cases. I probably wouldn´t have it on local drive, NVME space is too precious…
Well, ESR Firefox is not a bad thing, at least it doesn´t brake things, you can be sure your favourite addons will run. On the other hand I sometimes do miss new features…
Don’t read about them and then you will never miss them. rotfl!
A reasonable backup strategy for that “once a year” black screen with cursor… personally I have a minimum install on the same disk, currently with 15.2.
Most “disasters” of late are linked to Nvidia or other special kernel modules or unusual software. As @karlmistelberger wrote, a “default install” is rock solid these days.
For what I do not know, does not turn me on, proven strategy indeed.
@et al:
Just to add a note of “realism” into the conversation, I’ve been running TW on a cMP for perhaps a couple of years?? it used to be “chill” . . . as described by the other posters, but in the last 6 - 8 months the weekly package upgrades have been like “1400 packages” . . . followed by some breakage on my grub menu, requiring time and effort to repair. This continues to occur. I think I skipped a week due to upgrading problems with grub menu, so today I found a “balloon” download waiting.
Right now I’m literally 1.5 hours into a projected “2232 package upgrade,” of which only 5 are “new” . . . in that time spent in a TTY the “connection error” problem has happened 7 times . . . zypper proclaims it took “5 tries” to reconnect before erroring out of the download. Hitting “r” and immediately download begins again.
It has become close to “not being worth it” for me . . . it doesn’t seem like the devs really understand what “rolling” distribution is about??? Coming extremely close to nuke n pave time. >:(:’(:sarcastic:
Hi
It’s expected to happen at times, glibc updates, gcc updates, usr merge etc package rebuilds required, Tumbleweed is rolling release, not a distribution.
It’s time for getting updates in background, with or without PackageKit. I do this in a script with aria2 so zypper is not locked up during that time.
Please, elaborate.
What did OP write to make you come to that conclusion?
My primary browsers are SeaMonkeys, latest and next/beta. Firefox latest never stood a chance of being primary here, especially after it got onto its string of sext-weekly UI overhauls and functionality disappearances. I use Firefox-ESR interchangeably with Chromium where FF UA strings in SM aren’t sufficient. I also use Palemoon 24/7, and on occasion, Falkon. I can’t imagine using only one web browser. All the latest major players stink, trying to out-do each other to be the best at emulating each others’ lack of utility and pleasing ad servers.