Open Build System and OpenQA, for automated building and testing of packages. This is what gets updates to their rolling release Tumbleweed faster than Arch, but with no instability ever. I can't emphasize enough how rock solid Tumbleweed is. OBS also doubles as their own AUR equivalent - you can make your own repo and do your own builds and install from the command line, or browse and install what other people have done.
Leap is their stable distro, and shares binaries with SLES, their enterprise offering.
Both Leap and Tumbleweed have BTRFS by default, with Snapper for automated snapshots at upgrade and boot. Update messed something up? System won't boot? Just run an old snapshot until it's fixed. Zypper, the package manager, has state-of-the-art dependancy resolution, personally the best I've used.
They have a number of extremely interesting spinoff projects: MicroOS and MicroOS desktop (recently renamed, but the new names are escaping me) which use immutable root filesystems with automated updates and native Podman support. Snapper integration shines there, as well. If it fails to boot after update, it'll automatically roll back.
They're doing quite a bit, and it's all culminating in being very useable. Tumbleweed is the crown jewel, though.
I have been using Tumbleweed for a few years now, but while it seems like a stable rolling release distribution, I am not quite sure about the "rolling release" part. Each month, a new snapshot comes out, which upgrades every single package you have installed, regardless of whether there were actual upstream updates. With a full Texlive installation and just a few more suites this amount to roughly 10,000 packages and over 5GB that need to be downloaded and installed each month. This a) kind of defeats the rolling-release aspect for me, b) takes a few hours, and c) feels like a cheat for the sake of stability.
Between those snapshots you might have bleeding edge updates for all the packages, but even then I do encounter package conflicts way too often. Well, on the upside, at least they are detected.
So yes, it is stable, but it comes at a price.
Apart from that, the community support felt mediocre, at least a few years ago. The most visited platform was a bulletin board forum with very little interaction. When I had trouble installing KDE, it took a few days until someone suggested the correct diagnostic tools. This is bad for being the testbed of a commercial distribution. In the end, I just installed Arch, which packaged KDE better than Tumbleweed did.
But on the other hand, maybe only if you use a distro long enough, you get to see the downsides, and each one has them.
>Each month, a new snapshot comes out, which upgrades every single package you have installed, regardless of whether there were actual upstream updates.
A) Snapshots come out far more regularly then once a month. Going from the mailing list we've actually had a snapshot released every day since the 4th. I'd say the average is one every three days but that's just from the top of my head.
B) they do not cover every package you have installed: They don't even know what packages you have installed, snapshots are cut on the repo side. It's true that packages get rebuilt a lot but that's because either the package updated or a dependency of the package updated that caused the package to be rebuilt.
There are new snapshots at least once a week. While there are large updates every once in a while, those are usually due to gcc or glibc upgrades which require a rebuild of most packages -- which doesn't happen every month. If you actually have upgrades of every single package every month, you should open a bug report to figure out what is going on -- that is absolutely not normal. On my machine I usually see 10-30 packages per update, with some updates hitting ~100 packages -- anything more than that is quite rare. Large rebuilds should be uncommon, though some packages might do them more than others.
There are quite a few things I've grown to dislike about Tumbleweed after using it for the past 7-8 years, but the upgrade experience is not one of them.
Great, thanx for telling. I'll stick to Leap. Update fatigue. We're using it on servers and I'm looking for something to replace Ubuntu on the desktop. I've grown tired of the usual Ubuntu antics like snaps, ads in apt update and the convoluted /etc config hierarchy inherited from Deban. SuSE is structured way more logically and makes more sense even if it's a rpm distribution. I don't want to use a rolling distro at work to break things just when I have to deliver stuff or fix time pressing issues. I've tried Debian 12 when it came out but Firefox was unusable, some very annoying focus issues on forms.
I'd like to know if the Gnome 4 in Leap was usable. If I do a search on software.opensuse.org on gnome-desktop it only turns out packages from tumbleweed and experimental packages from SLE-15-SP2 which looks quite ancient.
You can always run Debian testing on desktop. I'm running the same installation more than a decade now. It's not "bleeding edge", but recent enough. Things slow down during freezes a bit, but it's a rolling distro at the end of the day.
>So yes, it is stable, but it comes at a price.
That's called a trade-off, a very fundamental concept in pretty much everything in life.
And no, snapshots don't come out every month. They come out ~5 times every week. The most number of packages I've had to update was maybe around ~3500 and that's after 6 month of not upgrading my system.
I agree for "true" rolling distro enthusiasts, Arch is still the top choice, but Tumbleweed is great for those seeking to use a rolling distro without sinking too much time into configuration.
> but with no instability ever
Uh, I've been using Tumbleweed on two machines for about seven years now, and I've experienced multiple cases of MATE just not working after an upgrade. It's not that big a deal, though, as you point out, because of snapper.
That said, I'm still using Tumbleweed on both machines, and I'm very happy with it. Even the nVidia situation is acceptable now that they offer a repo with the official drivers.
+1 for zypper. The GUI feels very "enterprise-y" but in a good way. You just pick the software you want and it gets the job done quickly and with a minimum of fuss.
Cli for zypper is fantastic too. Zypper is my favorite of the bunch.
Zypper has the best UX of the CLI package management tools i've tried, at least as far as updates and installation come. My favorite part, which is minor and yet makes finding packages you might want to keep an eye on when updating, is how it highlights with a color the first letter of any package to be installed/updated/etc. It was a "why don't other package managers do this?" moment the first time i saw it.
(ok perhaps other package managers do it nowadays, but i installed openSUSE 2-3 years ago and i haven't really tried every package manager out there - mainly apt/apt-get and pacman as it comes with msys2)
> faster than Arch
that's a thing I haven't heard in a long time
Even Fedora tends to update packages faster than Arch
Having used (and still using) Arch for over a decade, I can tell it is probably a good thing. Maintainers seem to know which packages bring trouble after updates and they do seem to test those more thoroughly. I have not experienced major breaking changes for desktop or other important piece of software in many years now.
For example, things like Gnome always come to Arch months after it has been released upstream. But it makes sense because Gnome team always break existing extensions and community can't really keep up so it takes a while until popular extensions gain support. And sadly Gnome without extensions is more or less useless. Maybe Fedora gets latest Gnome on day one, but it is unusable without community extensions on day one.
So kudos to maintainers of Arch!
Somehow my experience is the other way around: Arch updates more slowly but somehow still manages to be much less stable...
What broke recently for you?
Yes its probably not bleeding edge anymore at this stage
I only tried debian based distros on the side, arch being so quick I never thought others did match or go above. Interesting.
This isn't borne out by the numbers, for the average package. Not for openSUSE or for Fedora. The only full Linux distros I currently see with a higher percentage of up-to-date packages than Arch are KaOS, CRUX, Slackware and NixOS: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest
Of course, whether or not the most important packages to you hit each distro first could be a totally different story.
Overall, openSUSE Tumbleweed is very up-to-date, though: ~76% by this measure— right up there with Fedora Rawhide and Gentoo.
I moved from Ubuntu to Tumbleweed a year ago and slowly warmed up to it. Two days ago some update made it fail to start sddm (the display manager, aka graphical login screen) correctly. Some error regarding missing libraries. Network is also not working anymore.
After trying to repair it for a while I am about to ditch it and go with KDE Neon or Mint (their Debian edition sounds interesting).
I will look into this Snapper thing you mentioned, maybe that helps. Otherwise my trust in that distro is unfortunately gone.
All these are nice features but until I see suse wiki pages in google search results along side the ones I see from arch, it's just easier to stay on arch.
> Open Build System and OpenQA, for automated building and testing of packages. This is what gets updates to their rolling release Tumbleweed faster than Arch, but with no instability ever.
Arch also has "no instability ever". And I don't think I've ever run into a problem where I've said, "damn, I wish the latest version was out right now", other than needing to run mainline on new machines for a few months that is.
But please don't take this comment the wrong way, I'm curious and will probably spin up a VM or two to take a look around.
> Arch also has "no instability ever".
Lolwat. I've tried it in earnest several times over the years on basic thinkpads (once on my only development machine, in which my only customizations were basically installing intellij ides and docker) and I would never ever, call it stable. I mean, if someone were to ask me for a picture of instability for a dictionary and they asked me to choose between Arch Linux and Windows Me logos... I'm not sure which I would choose.
To be fair though, I haven't tried it in 3 years since it last bit me. On the other hand I've had fedora running on one machine for like 7 years straight.
I've had arch running for a solid 7 years the only instability I've had to deal with is when a kernel update broke Bluetooth on my desktop.
What instability did you face?
ooo, that auto rollback sounds really cool-- got any idea how that's done? I assume it's handled by checking for eg. a dirty-fs-flag just before the initfs boots the real system, but what if there's breakage in userspace (eg. the login manager) or in the initramfs itself?
Snapper creates a Btrfs snapshot before any change in the root filesystem. If something breaks, you choose an older snapshot to boot from via grub.
By a bizzare coincidence, I just had a breaking update today. CUPS was missing some symbols and wouldn't start. Rolled back to an earlier snapshot and all is well.
I have to say, openSUSE introduced me to btrfs and while it isn't something i use often, when i do need the snapshot functionality it provides it is such a great feature.
The automatic snapshots saved me quite a lot to time on 2 occasions, where borked updates of the nVidia drivers resulted in problems booting the computer. On one hand, this should never happen. On the other, as long as nVidia does not improve, and nothing is going to force them, it is great to have such a safety net. It gets out of the way 99% of the time, but it is there when you need it, it’s great.
That's why Fedora also switched to this BTRFS snapshot model last year. It's slower than ext4, but much easier to rollback.
I got burned by debian btrfs upgrades, so I'll stay with ext4 though.
To add to the SP, the initramfs is kept on the same filesystem as everything else by default, not on a separate partition, so the initramfs is loaded from the snapshot too. However if GRUB breaks then you won't be able to boot.