5 ms·

I currently use Debian for my personal laptop. Any advantages to moving to OpenSuse Tumbleweed?

dizhn 3y ago
btrfs support and snapper snapshots and a huge variety of packages. More if you are willing to use AUR-like Home: packages.
krylon 3y ago
(Context: I run Tumbleweed on two desktop machines) With Tumbleweed you have much more up-to-date packages than with Debian stable. Probably even more than Debian testing a lot of the time. I initially tried it because I had bought a laptop that Debian wouldn't even install on for some reason, so I think it's fair to say support for very recent hardware should be better on Tumbleweed. The downside is - to me, at least, that there are frequently large batches of updates (hundreds of packages) that take relatively long to install, make reboots (or at least a logout-login for your desktop session) necessary, and on occasion break something. If you have an nVidia GPU (like I do, sigh), every now and then the kernel will be so recent they haven't updated their drivers, causing Xorg to fail. When something breaks, thanks to btrfs and snapper, one can roll back to the most recent working state, and for me at least, trying again a few days later tended to work again[1]. But it is more "exciting" than life on Debian stable. ;-) On the recent article about OpenSUSE Leap, one user commented they switched from Tumbleweed to Manjaro (an Arch-based distro) which offers many of the same benefits but has worked better for them. There are differences between Debian and OpenSUSE in general, which I'm not sure I'm the most qualified person to discuss. Last but not least, the community on the OpenSUSE support forums is very friendly and helpful in my experience, although I rarely have a need to go there. [1] You can do that with Debian, too, of course. But OpenSUSE uses btrfs for the root filesystem by default and has snapper in the base install.
- mosselman 3y ago
  That btrfs and snapper sound interesting. I know nothing about them though. Do you know of some article describing how you use it to revert to previous states of your machine?
  - CraigJPerry 3y ago
    It’s not for tumbleweed but i thought this article was well written https://sysguides.com/install-fedora-38-with-snapshot-and-rollback-support/ https://sysguides.com/install-fedora-38-with-snapshot-and-ro...
  - tmtvl 3y ago
    Basically what you do is you boot up your computer, enter the password for your encrypted drive, and when on the GRUB boot screen you can select "Filesystem Snapshots" and boot into one of those, which reverts most of your root partition to an earlier state. The Arch wiki has a decent article about Snapper: <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Snapper https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Snapper>, though note that the OpenSUSE installer makes it easy to set up the btrfs subvolumes.
    - dizhn 3y ago
      I think it says " read only snapshots ". On tw anyway.
  - kergonath 3y ago
    I don’t have a specific article, but it did save me a couple of times when Nvidia drivers updates borked the kernel, or X, or both. One line in the terminal to roll back to a stable state, it’s great.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Snapper_Tutorial https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Snapper_Tutorial When I first installed tw, i tested the snapshot functionality first. At the very least understand how it does not (by default) snapshot /home and how it takes an automatic snapshot after rpm (zypper) operations. Once there was a wifi issue that borked a lot of our machines and very few people actually knew how to rollback or had ever tried it before. A crisis situation is not a good time to test these things. This is especially an issue because as you'll see in the link above not all tw installs will have snapshot support. One major determinator is disk size. It won't get enabled with less than 20gb root space.
usr1106 3y ago
It's quite the opposite philosophy: Debian keeps things stable for a long time. Tumbleweed updates huge parts of the system rather frequently. And to have a safety net, it takes snapshots of the installation before the upgrade. You can easily run Debian on 10 year old laptop with a rotating disk. You'd probably don't want to do that with Tumbleweed. It fully depends on your preferences what you count as an advantage.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  If you have a 10+ year laptop then there's not much of an advantage going with rolling distros. Stable Debian/Ubuntu distros would be better suited. Rolling distros are great if you get a brand new laptop with modern HW and fancy features (AV1 encoding, thunderbolt/USB4, keyboard RGB, OLED displays with HDR, variable refresh rate, etc) that require you to be on the bleeding edge to make use of them.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Of course there is. You get to benefit from the latest versions of GNOME or KDE plus thousands of packages that have more recent versions in rolling distros.
    - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
      I was talking from the perspective of the average user who's moving from away Windows on their 10+ year old laptop, not the developer/tinkerer focused HN userbase who always wants to be on the bleedings edge. Debian/Ubuntu stable is more than good enough for 95% of the average users, especially, on such old machines, you're better off with Ubuntu/Debian stable than bleeding edge rolling. You don't get any benefits from rolling on such old hardware for the average user but get more risks from potential issues from being on the bleeding edge. Ubuntu distros exist that take KDE to the bleeding edge but keep everything else on the sabe branch, you don't need to go rolling distro for that.
      - ekianjo 3y ago
diffeomorphism 3y ago
Think of it as debian testing or unstable with more official support, nicer setup and features out of the box (e.g. automatic btrfs snapshots and easy restore, yast) and more automated testing. TDLR: If you would like a rolling release with a more "offical" status than debian testing and more comfort/quality of life/tests/out of the box features than arch, this seems like an option worth trying.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Although I'm fond of both Debian and OpenSuse, one disadvantage to be aware of: You have to jump through extra hoops to get media codecs. I understand their reasons, but it was a pain last time I used it.
- sirkiller 3y ago
  I would not call "sudo zypper in opi && opi codecs" a pain :) Daily driving Tumbleweed for 2+ years.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > I would not call "sudo zypper in opi && opi codecs" a pain :) I would; that's 2 extra commands that install an additional (unofficial? OBS is like the AUR or PPAs) repo and then install stuff from it, and you have to know to run them at all. Like, it's good that it's in the wiki, but compare the process for a new user: OpenSuse: 1. Open firefox, go to youtube or whatever. 2. Get error message about unsupported format. 3. Do a web search on that error. 4. Hopefully stumble across https://en.opensuse.org/Codecs https://en.opensuse.org/Codecs and thence https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Installing_codecs_from_Packman_repositories https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Installing_codecs_from_Packman_r... 5. Run the needed 2 commands to install codecs Debian: 1. Open firefox, go to youtube or whatever. (There is no step 2)
arun-mani-j 3y ago
Related, has anyone tried Debian with btrfs (with Snapper and other goodies) for your desktop?
- e12e 3y ago
  The author appears to run Ubuntu - but this should work for Debian too: https://www.zaccariotto.net/post/zfs-snapshot-rollback/ https://www.zaccariotto.net/post/zfs-snapshot-rollback/
- lproven 3y ago
  Try siduction or Spiral Linux. They are exactly this. It's a lot of work to set up, so a pre-configured distro helps.

btrfs support and snapper snapshots and a huge variety of packages. More if you are willing to use AUR-like Home: packages.

krylon 3y ago

(Context: I run Tumbleweed on two desktop machines) With Tumbleweed you have much more up-to-date packages than with Debian stable. Probably even more than Debian testing a lot of the time. I initially tried it because I had bought a laptop that Debian wouldn't even install on for some reason, so I think it's fair to say support for very recent hardware should be better on Tumbleweed. The downside is - to me, at least, that there are frequently large batches of updates (hundreds of packages) that take relatively long to install, make reboots (or at least a logout-login for your desktop session) necessary, and on occasion break something. If you have an nVidia GPU (like I do, sigh), every now and then the kernel will be so recent they haven't updated their drivers, causing Xorg to fail. When something breaks, thanks to btrfs and snapper, one can roll back to the most recent working state, and for me at least, trying again a few days later tended to work again[1]. But it is more "exciting" than life on Debian stable. ;-) On the recent article about OpenSUSE Leap, one user commented they switched from Tumbleweed to Manjaro (an Arch-based distro) which offers many of the same benefits but has worked better for them. There are differences between Debian and OpenSUSE in general, which I'm not sure I'm the most qualified person to discuss. Last but not least, the community on the OpenSUSE support forums is very friendly and helpful in my experience, although I rarely have a need to go there. [1] You can do that with Debian, too, of course. But OpenSUSE uses btrfs for the root filesystem by default and has snapper in the base install.

mosselman 3y ago
That btrfs and snapper sound interesting. I know nothing about them though. Do you know of some article describing how you use it to revert to previous states of your machine?
- CraigJPerry 3y ago
  It’s not for tumbleweed but i thought this article was well written https://sysguides.com/install-fedora-38-with-snapshot-and-rollback-support/ https://sysguides.com/install-fedora-38-with-snapshot-and-ro...
- tmtvl 3y ago
  Basically what you do is you boot up your computer, enter the password for your encrypted drive, and when on the GRUB boot screen you can select "Filesystem Snapshots" and boot into one of those, which reverts most of your root partition to an earlier state. The Arch wiki has a decent article about Snapper: <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Snapper https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Snapper>, though note that the OpenSUSE installer makes it easy to set up the btrfs subvolumes.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    I think it says " read only snapshots ". On tw anyway.
- kergonath 3y ago
  I don’t have a specific article, but it did save me a couple of times when Nvidia drivers updates borked the kernel, or X, or both. One line in the terminal to roll back to a stable state, it’s great.
- dizhn 3y ago
  https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Snapper_Tutorial https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Snapper_Tutorial When I first installed tw, i tested the snapshot functionality first. At the very least understand how it does not (by default) snapshot /home and how it takes an automatic snapshot after rpm (zypper) operations. Once there was a wifi issue that borked a lot of our machines and very few people actually knew how to rollback or had ever tried it before. A crisis situation is not a good time to test these things. This is especially an issue because as you'll see in the link above not all tw installs will have snapshot support. One major determinator is disk size. It won't get enabled with less than 20gb root space.

usr1106 3y ago

It's quite the opposite philosophy: Debian keeps things stable for a long time. Tumbleweed updates huge parts of the system rather frequently. And to have a safety net, it takes snapshots of the installation before the upgrade. You can easily run Debian on 10 year old laptop with a rotating disk. You'd probably don't want to do that with Tumbleweed. It fully depends on your preferences what you count as an advantage.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
If you have a 10+ year laptop then there's not much of an advantage going with rolling distros. Stable Debian/Ubuntu distros would be better suited. Rolling distros are great if you get a brand new laptop with modern HW and fancy features (AV1 encoding, thunderbolt/USB4, keyboard RGB, OLED displays with HDR, variable refresh rate, etc) that require you to be on the bleeding edge to make use of them.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Of course there is. You get to benefit from the latest versions of GNOME or KDE plus thousands of packages that have more recent versions in rolling distros.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    I was talking from the perspective of the average user who's moving from away Windows on their 10+ year old laptop, not the developer/tinkerer focused HN userbase who always wants to be on the bleedings edge. Debian/Ubuntu stable is more than good enough for 95% of the average users, especially, on such old machines, you're better off with Ubuntu/Debian stable than bleeding edge rolling. You don't get any benefits from rolling on such old hardware for the average user but get more risks from potential issues from being on the bleeding edge. Ubuntu distros exist that take KDE to the bleeding edge but keep everything else on the sabe branch, you don't need to go rolling distro for that.
    - ekianjo 3y ago

diffeomorphism 3y ago

Think of it as debian testing or unstable with more official support, nicer setup and features out of the box (e.g. automatic btrfs snapshots and easy restore, yast) and more automated testing. TDLR: If you would like a rolling release with a more "offical" status than debian testing and more comfort/quality of life/tests/out of the box features than arch, this seems like an option worth trying.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

Although I'm fond of both Debian and OpenSuse, one disadvantage to be aware of: You have to jump through extra hoops to get media codecs. I understand their reasons, but it was a pain last time I used it.

sirkiller 3y ago
I would not call "sudo zypper in opi && opi codecs" a pain :) Daily driving Tumbleweed for 2+ years.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > I would not call "sudo zypper in opi && opi codecs" a pain :) I would; that's 2 extra commands that install an additional (unofficial? OBS is like the AUR or PPAs) repo and then install stuff from it, and you have to know to run them at all. Like, it's good that it's in the wiki, but compare the process for a new user: OpenSuse: 1. Open firefox, go to youtube or whatever. 2. Get error message about unsupported format. 3. Do a web search on that error. 4. Hopefully stumble across https://en.opensuse.org/Codecs https://en.opensuse.org/Codecs and thence https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Installing_codecs_from_Packman_repositories https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Installing_codecs_from_Packman_r... 5. Run the needed 2 commands to install codecs Debian: 1. Open firefox, go to youtube or whatever. (There is no step 2)

arun-mani-j 3y ago

Related, has anyone tried Debian with btrfs (with Snapper and other goodies) for your desktop?

e12e 3y ago
The author appears to run Ubuntu - but this should work for Debian too: https://www.zaccariotto.net/post/zfs-snapshot-rollback/ https://www.zaccariotto.net/post/zfs-snapshot-rollback/
lproven 3y ago
Try siduction or Spiral Linux. They are exactly this. It's a lot of work to set up, so a pre-configured distro helps.