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> One issue that always burned me with Fedora is a little configuration file. Wacom tablet support is basically gimped due to it. Everytime I use it I have to f

> One issue that always burned me with Fedora is a little configuration file. Wacom tablet support is basically gimped due to it. Everytime I use it I have to fix that, and no, it's not the wayland issue but one due to poor scroll handling. It's hard to find the fix and I tried looking into it right now. Last time I tried it was on Fedora 39, it has been there since 34. Maybe not in 40 though. Isn't Fedora the 'testing' or bleeding edge distro/project for Red Hat? Did you on RHEL Desktop? That's the only RHAT based product that should have defaults that work with those tablets, IMO. Don't you think it's likely there is some hardware out there where an OpenSUSE default causes an issue that doesn't happen in other distros? > I don't know the reason, but I've had a better time with this distribution. I just wanted to share that it is a good one. That's more than fair. I'm just so skeptical when people say $distro is so much better or more stable than all the others. Most of the time someone just had a better experience with it, rather than it being objectively better in some way. All the main distros are pretty damn stable and solved all the frustration causing issues a long, long time ago IMO.

pxc 2y ago
> I'm just so skeptical when people say $distro is so much better or more stable than all the others. openSUSE has a more sophisticated (and more expensive, computationally and financially) automated QA process (Open Build Service + OpenQA) than many distros, which is what has earned its rolling releases the stability that has garnered this reputation. It's perhaps also affected by the predominance of Arch in the rolling release space; it's easy to look stable compared to a distro that sees it as the user's routine duty to watch for and fix certain kinds of incompatibility problems with updates. It's true that nowadays all distros are pretty good, but there are real technical differences between openSUSE and other distros which matter. The only distro with a distinct lineage that has a package manager much like openSUSE's is Fedora, and that's because dnf has copied key zypper features. dnf and zypper handle collections of multiple package sources (repository) much better than anything available in the Debian-based world does thanks to the notion of vendor change. It's of course true that there are good technical reasons to prefer other distros, as well. > All the main distros are pretty damn stable and solved all the frustration causing issues a long, long time ago IMO. Like I said, I mostly agree with this :)
- DEADMINCE 2y ago
  > openSUSE has a more sophisticated (and more expensive, computationally and financially) automated QA process (Open Build Service + OpenQA) than many distros, Than which distros, though? More so than Debian? Debian's seems pretty thorough. More so than Red Hat's, with the amount of important customers that depend on their distro? I'm skeptical. The rest are generally offshoots or geared towards a specific purpose or audience. > It's true that nowadays all distros are pretty good, but there are real technical differences between openSUSE and other distros which matter. So let's get into some details and examples! I'm interested and prepared to learn something here, hoping I might be enlightened - I haven't had a moment like that in a real long time, if that makes sense. > The only distro with a distinct lineage that has a package manager much like openSUSE's is Fedora, So, what makes the openSUSE package manager so much better than apk, apt or xbps? Hoping I'm not coming off as too combative, just interested in the convo.
  - pxc 2y ago
    > More so than Debian? Debian's seems pretty thorough. More so than Red Hat's, with the amount of important customers that depend on their distro? Yes and yes. openSUSE's automated testing builds each package not just in a chroot but a new barebones VM, to ensure that depdndency definitions are complete. I've seen Fedora devs remark about how they don't have that kind of budget to throw as, e.g., COPR builds, the implication being that they have to put more engineering into their testing infrastructure. (Sorry, it was years ago and I don't have the energy or time to source it.) Those VMs are accompanied with screen scrapers that perform OCR in order to automatically test the pre-boot environment, before a display server comes up. It is possible that other distros are catching up here (I know nixos-tests can include virtualized, multi-machine, networked integration tests, for some packages, for instance). But this testing infrastructure for openSUSE is quite mature. See, e.g., this presentation from nearly a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K6ZmvIOtPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K6ZmvIOtPw As for Debian, the greater centralization of openSUSE's package sources is perhaps worth emphasizing as a major difference here. For openSUSE, package sources are all checked into special VCS system that is part of the Open Build Service (which is capable of tracking and building external packages, including packages from other distros as well). With Debian, package sources are uploaded as binary artifacts by maintainers who can all have their own standards for style/conventions, testing, and other policies. It's not as easy to get a. God's-eye-view of Debian. This blog post provides some general insight into quirks of Debian's non-standardized processes, perhaps a few years out of date now (I don't know), but I hope it makes clear how it might be plausible for a smaller distro to have more mature centralized, automated testing: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin... > Debian generally seems to prefer decentralized approaches over centralized ones. For example, individual packages are maintained in separate repositories (as opposed to in one repository), each repository can use any SCM (git and svn are common ones) or no SCM at all, and each repository can be hosted on a different site. Of course, what you do in such a repository also varies subtly from team to team, and even within teams. > [...] > When you want to make a package available in Debian, you upload GPG-signed files via anonymous FTP. There are several batch jobs (the queue daemon, unchecked, dinstall, possibly others) which run on fixed schedules (e.g. dinstall runs at 01:52 UTC, 07:52 UTC, 13:52 UTC and 19:52 UTC). > Depending on timing, I estimated that you might wait for over 7 hours (!!) before your package is actually installable. Debian is an amazing project and it's no happenstance that it has served as the base for many successful distros as well as thrived in its own right for many years. But there's some social and technical cruft there that leaves room for some competition, isn't there? (It looks like nowadays Debian has actually adopted SUSE's openQA as part of its automated testing stack: https://openqa.debian.net/ https://openqa.debian.net/) I have a fuzzier picture of how OBS/openQA compares to Red Hat and Fedora's package building and testing tools! You've reminded me that I'd like to learn more about that. But do dig into OBS to get a sense of how SUSE is built. It may even be useful to you: their build cluster offers lots of free compute and it'll let you build and host repos for free— even of other distros like Debian and Red Hat. None of the tooling questions are the real stuff, though— the real stuff is the predictability and freshness of openSUSE Tumbleweed, which users of other rolling release distros tend to speak favorably about once they've tried it. Elements of that famous 'balance' are quantifiablw. Check out how openSUSE ranks on overall package freshness: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest Tumbleweed is substantially more up-to-date than Fedora Rawhide, but is also markedly more stable and more committed to stability— the expectation is generally that Tumbleweed should be highly usable by and reliable for non-experts, but the expectation for Rawhide is that it exists primarily for Fedora developers and any breakage is on you. I'd be happy to compare zypper (and dnf) to apt and all (I admit I've not used Void Linux). I've gotta go for now!

pxc 2y ago

> I'm just so skeptical when people say $distro is so much better or more stable than all the others. openSUSE has a more sophisticated (and more expensive, computationally and financially) automated QA process (Open Build Service + OpenQA) than many distros, which is what has earned its rolling releases the stability that has garnered this reputation. It's perhaps also affected by the predominance of Arch in the rolling release space; it's easy to look stable compared to a distro that sees it as the user's routine duty to watch for and fix certain kinds of incompatibility problems with updates. It's true that nowadays all distros are pretty good, but there are real technical differences between openSUSE and other distros which matter. The only distro with a distinct lineage that has a package manager much like openSUSE's is Fedora, and that's because dnf has copied key zypper features. dnf and zypper handle collections of multiple package sources (repository) much better than anything available in the Debian-based world does thanks to the notion of vendor change. It's of course true that there are good technical reasons to prefer other distros, as well. > All the main distros are pretty damn stable and solved all the frustration causing issues a long, long time ago IMO. Like I said, I mostly agree with this :)

DEADMINCE 2y ago
> openSUSE has a more sophisticated (and more expensive, computationally and financially) automated QA process (Open Build Service + OpenQA) than many distros, Than which distros, though? More so than Debian? Debian's seems pretty thorough. More so than Red Hat's, with the amount of important customers that depend on their distro? I'm skeptical. The rest are generally offshoots or geared towards a specific purpose or audience. > It's true that nowadays all distros are pretty good, but there are real technical differences between openSUSE and other distros which matter. So let's get into some details and examples! I'm interested and prepared to learn something here, hoping I might be enlightened - I haven't had a moment like that in a real long time, if that makes sense. > The only distro with a distinct lineage that has a package manager much like openSUSE's is Fedora, So, what makes the openSUSE package manager so much better than apk, apt or xbps? Hoping I'm not coming off as too combative, just interested in the convo.
- pxc 2y ago
  > More so than Debian? Debian's seems pretty thorough. More so than Red Hat's, with the amount of important customers that depend on their distro? Yes and yes. openSUSE's automated testing builds each package not just in a chroot but a new barebones VM, to ensure that depdndency definitions are complete. I've seen Fedora devs remark about how they don't have that kind of budget to throw as, e.g., COPR builds, the implication being that they have to put more engineering into their testing infrastructure. (Sorry, it was years ago and I don't have the energy or time to source it.) Those VMs are accompanied with screen scrapers that perform OCR in order to automatically test the pre-boot environment, before a display server comes up. It is possible that other distros are catching up here (I know nixos-tests can include virtualized, multi-machine, networked integration tests, for some packages, for instance). But this testing infrastructure for openSUSE is quite mature. See, e.g., this presentation from nearly a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K6ZmvIOtPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K6ZmvIOtPw As for Debian, the greater centralization of openSUSE's package sources is perhaps worth emphasizing as a major difference here. For openSUSE, package sources are all checked into special VCS system that is part of the Open Build Service (which is capable of tracking and building external packages, including packages from other distros as well). With Debian, package sources are uploaded as binary artifacts by maintainers who can all have their own standards for style/conventions, testing, and other policies. It's not as easy to get a. God's-eye-view of Debian. This blog post provides some general insight into quirks of Debian's non-standardized processes, perhaps a few years out of date now (I don't know), but I hope it makes clear how it might be plausible for a smaller distro to have more mature centralized, automated testing: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin... > Debian generally seems to prefer decentralized approaches over centralized ones. For example, individual packages are maintained in separate repositories (as opposed to in one repository), each repository can use any SCM (git and svn are common ones) or no SCM at all, and each repository can be hosted on a different site. Of course, what you do in such a repository also varies subtly from team to team, and even within teams. > [...] > When you want to make a package available in Debian, you upload GPG-signed files via anonymous FTP. There are several batch jobs (the queue daemon, unchecked, dinstall, possibly others) which run on fixed schedules (e.g. dinstall runs at 01:52 UTC, 07:52 UTC, 13:52 UTC and 19:52 UTC). > Depending on timing, I estimated that you might wait for over 7 hours (!!) before your package is actually installable. Debian is an amazing project and it's no happenstance that it has served as the base for many successful distros as well as thrived in its own right for many years. But there's some social and technical cruft there that leaves room for some competition, isn't there? (It looks like nowadays Debian has actually adopted SUSE's openQA as part of its automated testing stack: https://openqa.debian.net/ https://openqa.debian.net/) I have a fuzzier picture of how OBS/openQA compares to Red Hat and Fedora's package building and testing tools! You've reminded me that I'd like to learn more about that. But do dig into OBS to get a sense of how SUSE is built. It may even be useful to you: their build cluster offers lots of free compute and it'll let you build and host repos for free— even of other distros like Debian and Red Hat. None of the tooling questions are the real stuff, though— the real stuff is the predictability and freshness of openSUSE Tumbleweed, which users of other rolling release distros tend to speak favorably about once they've tried it. Elements of that famous 'balance' are quantifiablw. Check out how openSUSE ranks on overall package freshness: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest Tumbleweed is substantially more up-to-date than Fedora Rawhide, but is also markedly more stable and more committed to stability— the expectation is generally that Tumbleweed should be highly usable by and reliable for non-experts, but the expectation for Rawhide is that it exists primarily for Fedora developers and any breakage is on you. I'd be happy to compare zypper (and dnf) to apt and all (I admit I've not used Void Linux). I've gotta go for now!