Since I’ll be having so much things on my hands in the coming years so I probably won’t be able to upgrade my system yearly, I’m looking into a rolling release. The internets seem to be praising Manjaro, but I would love to stay in my own geeko camp. So for all of you running Tumbleweed, how stable is it for everyday use? How long can I expect it to run without an Arch-like crash? Are there any drawbacks compared to a regular release? + are there firmware issues (in my case intel iwlwifi and realtek firmware).
IME TW is rock stable. Arch like crashes are not to be expected, thanks to openQA testing. The only drawback, if one can call it drawback, are huge updates every once in a while. Even my cloudserver runs TW, haven’t found a reason yet to dup it to Leap 42.3
I’ve been using TW on one of my primary PCs since 20150508 and not had anything other than a few minor problems. Never in that time have I been left with a non-working PC… (yet :)).
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Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
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Hi. Compared to each previous poster, above, i have by light-years less Linux experience generally, & openSUSE experience specifically. I only discovered oS in May this year [at that time i previously had been a Linux Mint KDE, & was then a Maui Linux user], when i began researching both TW & Leap, then tested them in VMs. I fell in love with the idea of TW… openQA, BtrFS+Snapper, latest Plasma, latest pgms… & made the decision to convert both my Laptop [June] & Tower [July] from Maui to TW. Both those PCs are Intel-based, & in both i use the integrated GPU.
Over those months since, it is true that i have suffered some periods of “exciting stress”, ie, some things went wrong… BUT… i am certain that these were ALL my fault. For me the jump from the Ubuntu-based distros to oS needed a very steep learning curve, & i believe that it was various wrong things i occasionally did do, & important things i did not do [because i did not then know i needed to do], that caused the relatively few bigger problems i had. Now that i feel i have learned more, & am slightly less incompetent compared to back then, i find my TW on both PCs to be wonderful… i am really loving it.
As already mentioned, the zypper dup upgrades can be large, & they are very frequent. For the first couple of months i did them daily or every other day. However i dislike having to interrupt my workflow by rebooting that often, so now i try to do the dup’ing only weekly or even fortnightly, except when a security patch is needed, or there’s an important Plasma version# increase. So far for me this looks like being a happy compromise.
Summary: Even for the less experienced users like me, IMO TW [KDE] is a wonderful choice.
Hi GooeyGirl - I don’t know of any reason you would need to reboot after a zypper dup unless you’ve downloaded a new kernel that you are wanting to take for a test drive. You could still zypper dup daily if you wanted, and get the advantage of improvements to some of your desktop applications, and then reboot on weekends when it’s convenient.
As for me, I’ve definitely wrecked TW a couple of times so far this year. But I use release candidate kernels and other experimental, unsupported software. So, when I wreck it, it’s just because of me doing risky stuff.
Seems so old-fashioned. Probably this is part of the reason I’ve ruined my TW installation a couple of times this year - because I wasn’t rebooting until long after a zypper dup.
Oh well, guess I’d better change my ways. Thanks for pointing that out.
You can see that there’s lots of affected stuff there. Not only am i not knowledgeable enough to be confident that if i tried to restart each of those one by one i’d not make some grave error of commission or omission, but also… there’s just so many of them that i usually just grit my teeth & do the reboot as being the overall fastest way.
As i wrote earlier however, this is by definition a total interruption of my workflow, hence i evolved my less-frequent mode of now dup’ing only each week or each other week. Oh, for that previous remark to make sense to others who don’t know me [ie, everyone], i should add that at the end of each day i do not shutdown my pc, i suspend it, then resume the session next morning. If i did not do that, but only SD each night, then dup’ing & rebooting daily or each other day would be of much less consequence to me.
I laugh now when i recall that when i first discovered Linux [Mint] in Dec 2013 i somehow misunderstood & believed that unlike Windows, i could cheerfully install s/w & system updates without ever needing to reboot… because the system never prompted me to reboot [whereas Windows seemed to need a reboot soooooooo often & screamed about it]. Back then & into 2014 i thought that Linux must be some kind of modern magic, never needing reboots… Oh well.
So my experience has been extremely positive with TW but I am learning that you have to stick with the program. And for a newcomer its not always obvious what the program is
Used to use Zypper Update ignorantly and that stuffed up my system
Used extra repo for subpixel rendering from Gecko Linux. Somehow switching system files to that repo created issues later on
Didn’t realise how important snapshot ability is for this kind of distro. You want to be able to undo your mistakes
So to a another newcomer I would recommend to first use Leap to get familiar with Opensuse. At the same time I would recommend to start reading as much as possible on best practices to get the most out of TW.
This is what I am doing now before going back. I am tired of stuffing up my system through my own fault.
I think it is the best rolling distribution (but I am not an expert). So, I think it is one of the best rolling distributions.
I came from ArchLinux and now, after few weeks of use TW, I like it more.
Zypper is a powerful package manager (better that I thought some time ago).
BTW, my first distribution was SuSE Linux 8.2.
I hope to use TW for a long time now and to help and contribute (as much as I can).
Yes. YAST. And TW seems to me to be more solid and a “complete” distribution (but I am not an expert). More updates in TW and not a crash yet. Community (but this is openSUSE not TW).
(openSUSE - I think that is best implementation of KDE) + (TW good rolling distro) = something I cannot resist.
The feeling. I feel closer to TW than Arch.
No issue of late, even a screenshot in