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I like both. Tumbleweed has the advantage of having very up-to-date packages, new kernel version drop fairly early, a rolling release distro. The downside is t
by krylon 4y ago
I like both.
Tumbleweed has the advantage of having very up-to-date packages, new kernel version drop fairly early, a rolling release distro. The downside is that a) you get relatively frequent (once, twice a week or so) large batches of updated packages, which of course take time to download and install. It can be a bit tedious at times, especially if you're offline for a prolonged time and then need to catch up. Also, since these are new packages, not updated versions of older packages, the delta-RPM mechanism is basically useless, so the download volume is pretty large. Sometimes things can break, but I haven't had any trouble over the last ~12 months; also, I use MATE as my desktop, I naively assume GNOME or KDE get more love due to user numbers. Each update is preceded by a snapshot, so if something breaks, the solution is usually to roll back and try again a few days later.
Leap, in comparison, is the "boring" version (in a good way). It's a point-release distro that tries to be reasonably up to date, but values stability over bleeding-edge-ness. I don't know the details, but for a while now, openSUSE Leap has pulled in parts from SUSE's enterprise version, SLES, which one might naively hope could result in a more stable, less-buggy base system.
I use Tumbleweed on my desktop and my main laptop for the up-to-date freshness, Leap on my Raspberry Pi and a secondary laptop so I don't have to deal with the large volume of updates on these machines.
As a rule, for anything "serious", I'd be very hesitant to use a rolling release distro. On the desktop, I have an nVidia GPU, which is a bit troublesome sometimes, because Tumbleweed tends to use very bleeding-edge kernel releases, and sometimes they'll release a new kernel package before nVidia has updated their driver to work with that kernel.
I think Tumbleweed and Leap relate to each other like Debian testing and stable, if that is any help.
openSUSE has a great system installation/configuration/administration utility called YaST that is very newbie-friendly.
- kwanbix 4y agoThanks. I have mostly used Ubuntu and Fedora, as most of the time, if some software is not in the repos, it will have installers for both of them. But I am always tempted to try SuSE.