I am not a programmer just a user, so I please for excuse for not understanding some things that only for programmers is to understand.
Last month I tried 3 Linux rolling distros to see what a rolling distro is and what I will become from Tumbleweed in the future.
The distros were: sambayon, chakra and aptosid. I didn’t try gentoo and arch cose they are a special case and don’t use binaries.
So the experience: all distros are quite good, quick and reliable. They distinguished by the development policy and relations to their “parent” distro.
Chakra hasn’t now any relation to arch.
Sambayon tries to have one, bur when you use “emerge” and install gentoo package you can destroy all your system complete.
Aptosid can tolerate debian packages but if it come from stable repos you have immediately problems with dependencies.
As I can see is aptosid the nearest rolling distro to TW.
Is it a way for Tumbleweed?
Will TW be independent from openSUSE?
Will TW have independent repos form suse stalbe and as recommended repos only suse factory?
Now is TW quite stable but in the fact the nearest to blade edge rolling distro as any other. Is it a tendency or just an incident?
Where is Tumbleweed to go? Can Tumbleweed developers (Creators) tell it us?
Tumbleweed is a rolling release of openSUSE, which means users can have fresher code and distro packagers can get their work into useage faster than an 8 month release cycle permits. So think of it as an alternative to old fashioned static release idea like 11.3, 11.4 & 12.1 with software not gaining functionality, but only security & important bug fixes being made available via update. Something that’s breaking down as for instance shown by FireFox browswer.
Doubt if anyone here can predict the future but this was the launch prospectus :
Portal:Tumbleweed - openSUSE
https://lwn.net/Articles/419025/
My opinion is that Tumbleweed suceeds, that it’s probably helping the developement of 12.1 and showing the Online Build Service infrastructure supports well a Rolling model.
There’s not arguments on the mailing lists about Tumbleweed, a few queries about generally small issues crop up weekly, showing Tumble is in real useage.
I would like soon to see, Tumbleweed be given equal status as a release like 11.4 & Factory in online repos, as a flavour of the distro; perhaps taking the “current” label. In SuSE Studio you can create a directly installable Tumbleweed from Live CD, so I see no reason to limit it to “add on” repo to 11.4, though perhaps infrastructure improvements would be needed to facilitate that. But I have always been in favour of rolling release for networked desktops, as in general improved functionality of applications is worth more than the cost of instability due to changes.
Using the standard openSUSE Vendor string, would reduce awkwardness with Packman packages, as it protects packages from updates produced by different packagers, over-ruling version changes. So I’d like thta change to, it’s logical as Tumbleweed packages are sourced from Factory.
I think the stability is down to the infrastructure developed and emphasis to make openSUSE a “sane” stable distro in use, fresh but not on a mission to cut itself on the bleeding edge, in every single project. That shows with some conservative choices, like providing squid-2.7 stable as well as squid-3.1. That professionally employed core, means volunteer testers and developers efforts are leveraged, rather than having to track down every single small problem, as well as volunteers maintaining project infrastructure.
That said, I would like ideally a slower, solid Tumbleweed, “Stumbleweed” that is more conservative and patient, say about a month behind Tumbleweed and aims to reduce over-frequent small updates, with those x.y.2 or x.y.3 type releases improved by feedback from early adopters, with fewer serious bugs present. A roller that would be truly production worthy in other words. No early adoption of risky things like KDE4 or GNOME3, stuff would need to actually work; though that could become problematic due to scarcity of resources to maintain older releases of re-developed projects.