What happened to TW?

the extremely common issues with TW are really making me consider to switch because it’s borderline unusable since a few months.
2024 was an absolute disaster for me on TW, it’s my daily driver, but too many issues are making it harder and harder to use each day.
from kernel panics to driver issues, numerous mesa bugs, qemu regression, broken packages causing unexpected bugs (like rpm blender removing an audio device from the list when JACK is selected in the options)

i am not mad, and i’m thankful for those who dedicate their time to maintain this distro and help ppl like me, however my question is: why ?
why was the year 2023 near perfect while 2024 was such a disaster for TW ? what happened ?

why are the codecs not available from the main repos ? ubuntu and fedora don’t have this problem, so why does opensuse needs a third party and invasive repo for this ?

packman also creates lots of problems on all-amd systems, due to Mesa, why aren’t these built without stripped features on the main repos as well ?

1 Like

@kyral not had issues here, but I don’t use Tumbleweed on AMD hardware on a daily basis (well I do have Aeon on AMD, but it’s just a test laptop)… Intel (iGPU and ARC) and Nvidia…

It’s the “open” in openSUSE, not using proprietary and patent encumbered codecs, drivers etc. It’s always been that way.

1 Like

i can understand that, but then that makes the distribution much harder to use, at best it forces users to rely on flatpaks as much as possible, which isn’t always possible.

are the mesa packages from opensuse only stripped from codecs ? having to rely on packman to get codecs seems very unsafe especially when you consider the regular desyncs and issues from packman, as far as i know it’s not controlled by opensuse so how can we trust packman ?

is the risk truly worth it just to keep the distribution «pure» at the cost of increasing instability and potentially killing user experience ?

We switched to Leap.

@kyral packman is in the bulk of cases it’s just a rebuild service that links to the openSUSE packages (Mesa and codecs). All that is done via bcond macros, so same sources, same maintainers etc just rebuilds with other items turned on.

1 Like

same source and same maintainers, that is reassuring. but then that brings another question.
why do so many people claim that packman makes the system unstable ? is it just a coincidence ?

@kyral depends what they have installed, one issue is that linking to openSUSE Factory invariably puts it out of sync with Tumbleweed as it rebuilds before everything is released in a snapshot…

I don’t use it, I prefer to use flatpaks (since I use that on Aeon) for the stuff I need or compile locally…

that makes sense, but why aren’t the builds delayed until TW is released ? that would avoid the issue ? no ?
i would like to use flatpaks more but there are some roblems that i can’t get around with easily with flatpak, and it’s quite annoying
the first being that flatpaks are containerized so some plugins addons for blender/vscode don’t work well because of this, same for discord which can’t communicate with RPC inside flatpaks

@kyral It’s very much automated, limited hardware and resources to manage, so not an easy thing to accomplish…

I use blender here without issues, likewise vscode (I use the tarball for that…)

I think you need rpmfusion repo for codecs on Fedora. Redhat is quite paranoid about legal and patent stuff.

Not a single showstopper here in 2024, only a few minor glitches that were fixed in a week or so (but no AMD HW in daily use too).
Mesa from Packman is only needed if you need HW decoding of some video formats on some HW, so safe guess most users don’t need Mesa from Packman.
Same for codecs, many popular formats (e.g. mp3) have expired patents, so packman is really needed for a few formats only.
But I understand that most users just “switch everything to Packman” and then don’t follow the mailing lists and don’t defer upgrading when a new Mesa is on the horizon and… complain.
Yes, Tumbleweed is not for everybody but is remarkably stable for a rolling distro (if managed properly, I must add…)

HW decoding of some video formats on some HW

which is according to the OpenSUSE docs : H264/MP4 / HEVC
i’m sorry but it’s just mandatory for anyone working on video editing/recording
hardware encoding/decoding is a standard, i just don’t understand how people can be okay with software decoding.

hardware decoding isn’t an option, it’s necessary.
and before flatpak gets mentionned, what about softwares that are not released as flatpaks ?

some softwares are literally unusable without hardware decoding, for a full-amd build owner like me, hardware decoding has never been an option, it’s necessary and nothing can replace it, flatpak isn’t viable in the long run cause the software devs still need to package it, meaning that you can’t run any program with hardware accel unless it’s packaged as flatpak.

But I understand that most users just “switch everything to Packman” and then don’t follow the mailing lists and don’t defer upgrading when a new Mesa is on the horizon and… complain.

1/ it is part of the official documentation to switch to packman, i don’t see any warnings or anything there that tells the average user that this procedure can cause any issues
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Installing_codecs_from_Packman_repositories

2/ i don’t think it is a valid argument to blame users for not following mailing lists, i personally use my computer to work with it, not to read emails all day, i’d use Arch otherwise.

@kyral Hardware decoding and encoding works OTB with Intel and Nvidia (Open driver) here, nothing needed…

https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/1do7vd6/why_are_codecs_still_a_problem/?rdt=34682

1 Like

yep, nvidia and intel, but not AMD, which is about 30% of the desktop PC market share according to Steam

i didn’t try the ARC GPUs from intel yet, however based onmy own experience, the nvidia drivers do work well OOTB for CUDA and hw accel for lots of things, but for everything else they’re absolute garbage, i must be honest.

issue ive encountered so far on my own laptop and a friends desktop pc running tumbleweed with an nvidia gpu :

  • nvidia driver crash when resuming from suspend
  • black screen after exiting hibernation
  • extremely unstable and prone to artifacts on wayland (limiting usage of some softwares made exclusively for wayland)

from my experience, the nvidia drivers are the absolute worst on linux, even if the features OOTB do work flawlessly, the fact that there’s a ton of rendering issues on it, along with the massive issues with wayland can make it a deal breaker.
from my experience, wayland has been unusable for months with plasma, due to the artifacts in the DE, switching back to X11 fixes that however, but then X11 causes some security issues, is prone to tearing, lacks fractioanl scaling support and VRR, etc

Nothing wrong with Tumbleweed here. On AMD, yes minor glitches but all works great!

i personally wouldn’t call a GPU driver crash a «minor glitch» to be honest
things used to work great

No blame on users, but any rolling distro is not for everybody; if you use one you need to know what you are doing.
You have AMD HW and you need HEVC HW decoding so that you need Mesa from Packman? Either use btrfs and snapper and rollback in case of trouble, or look for “Mesa” when doing “zypper dup” before actually committing and wait and monitor the Forums or the factory mailing list for a few days (major faults show up pretty quickly).
Unfortunately HW related problems cannot be filtered out by openQA (which runs on virtualized environments) and Mesa developers (many of which from Intel) are unlikely to test every release on non-mainstream HW unless there is a bug report, that is unless early adopters find that bug. Try not being an early adopter if that is vital for you.

BTW, no big issues here with Intel, Nvidia, Gnome on Wayland.

@kyral I don’t use Open Broadcast Studio, but installed the flatpak version, it detected hardware etc?

info: ---------------------------------
info: Initializing OpenGL...
info: Loading up OpenGL on adapter Intel Mesa Intel(R) Arc(tm) A380 Graphics (DG2)
info: OpenGL loaded successfully, version 4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 24.3.1 (git-c815d651b8), shading language 4.60
....
info: ---------------------------------
info: Available Encoders:
info:   Video Encoders:
info: 	- ffmpeg_svt_av1 (SVT-AV1)
info: 	- ffmpeg_aom_av1 (AOM AV1)
info: 	- jim_nvenc (NVIDIA NVENC H.264)
info: 	- jim_hevc_nvenc (NVIDIA NVENC HEVC)
info: 	- jim_av1_nvenc (NVIDIA NVENC AV1)
info: 	- ffmpeg_vaapi_tex (FFmpeg VAAPI H.264)
info: 	- av1_ffmpeg_vaapi_tex (FFmpeg VAAPI AV1)
info: 	- hevc_ffmpeg_vaapi_tex (FFmpeg VAAPI HEVC)
info: 	- obs_qsv11_v2 (QuickSync H.264)
info: 	- obs_qsv11_av1 (QuickSync AV1)
info: 	- obs_qsv11_hevc (QuickSync HEVC)
info: 	- obs_x264 (x264)
info:   Audio Encoders:
info: 	- ffmpeg_aac (FFmpeg AAC)
info: 	- ffmpeg_opus (FFmpeg Opus)
info: 	- ffmpeg_pcm_s16le (FFmpeg PCM (16-bit))
info: 	- ffmpeg_pcm_s24le (FFmpeg PCM (24-bit))
info: 	- ffmpeg_pcm_f32le (FFmpeg PCM (32-bit float))
info: 	- ffmpeg_alac (FFmpeg ALAC (24-bit))
info: 	- ffmpeg_flac (FFmpeg FLAC (16-bit))
info: 	- libfdk_aac (libfdk AAC)
info: ==== Startup complete ===============================================

I use Tumbleweed with an AMD card, no flatpaks, and the only problem I can think of this past year was a kernel update that slowed my system down badly. I rolled back and it was fixed a couple days later. I didn’t have any problems with Mesa. When Packman is out of sync, I wait a couple days until the issue is resolved to update affected packages. It can be irritating, but it’s not a real problem to me. I had more/worse problems during updates when using an Ubuntu derivative.

1 Like