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(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 Deb
by 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 agoThat 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 agoIt’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 agoBasically 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 agoI think it says " read only snapshots ". On tw anyway.
- kergonath 3y agoI 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 agohttps://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.