Why You Should Use Tumbleweed

"It uses openCV and a library of reference screenshots (with areas of interest selected to allow openQA to ignore things we don’t care about) which we call ‘needles’ ..."

OpenQA is a fascinating project. The tests are written in perl and I think the OpenCV magical stuff is around the "check_screen()" function.

For example, a test for Firefox:

    x11_start_program("firefox https://html5test.com/index.html", 6, {valid => 1});

    # makes firefox as default browser

    if (check_screen('firefox_default_browser')) {
        assert_and_click 'firefox_default_browser_yes';
    }

https://github.com/os-autoinst/os-autoinst-distri-opensuse/b...

This does all sound quite compelling. Somehow OpenSUSE has fallen under my radar, I've been an Arch user for a few years, and Gentoo user before that, and I'd only ever be interested in rolling distros, but I wasn't aware that OpenSUSE had Tumbleweed for this.

I did find dependency conflicts all too common on Gentoo, and keeping the system up to date was a frequent struggle. I've not had any major issues with Arch recently, and any that occur are usually fixed by doing a full system upgrade, but they do occur from time to time. I'd be interested to see how SUSE differs.

One thing I've noticed when doing a quick bit of reading on your Wiki - it sounds like you can't update Nvidia drivers from the package manager in Tumbleweed, and it has to be done manually. It also sounds like this process has to be done any time you update the kernel or X. This sounds like quite a pain - manually installing the nvidia drivers isn't exactly complex, but it's a number of manual steps that I'd rather not have to go through outside of the package manager every time I do a system update. Am I missing something here, or is this the case?

It also sounds like it supports installing with sysvinit rather than systemd, which is a rarity these days, and might appeal to some people.

The main problem these days is that people don't give a fuck about packaging their software for the constellations of distributions that exist. OpenSUSE topic-repositories usually offer the latest packaged version of most things for the Stable version too (say the Games repository), where available. But in many cases, latest versions are just not there for anyone.

We are in a model now where OS repositories have been replaced by npm, pip, rubygems in the best case. By pulling from Github's master branch in the worst (wink at Golang). In a sense, your system is already a rolling distro, except plugged to a third-party-managed repository which you trust to install packages produced by total strangers.

That does sound pretty cool.

Who owns Suse again? Do they have a social contract? How's their democratic decision making? Do they properly separate non-free software from their free packages?

- Debian User.

I have some relatively fond memories of SuSE, because it was my first GNU/Linux distribution. Back then, it had the advantage of being pretty newbie-friendly (graphical installer / system control utility) and good ISDN support. Since ISDN apparently never became popular outside of Germany, not many distros had good support for it, and setting it up manually could be a real pain (at least for a newbie - a couple of years later, I set up a dial-on-demand ISDN router using NetBSD). So SuSE was, in retrospect a good choice for a first distro.

Eventually, though, I got fed up with YaST, because it used to overwrite config files and thus wipe out all manual changes one made to them. Does SuSE still do that? I remember reading about plans to rewrite YaST from scratch, so hopefully they found a better way of dealing with config files. From a UI perspective, YaST was a neat tool for non-techies.

So it automatically ships the latest versions of e.g. screen and vim, no manual recompiling/installing necessary?

That's always been my biggest gripe with other distros, they'd have a version of an app or tool that was built once years ago and never touched again. I'm sold, I'll be taking Tumbleweed for a test drive tonight.

Ok, I'm a long time suse fan (ever since I dropped mandrake). But, mostly I run it in desktop VM's (openSuse) or on server class machines (sles). With the late 12.x series, it was working so well as a desktop OS in the VM that I decided to install it on a real piece of hardware and use it as a daily driver. That was a first for me in about 10 years. And it mostly worked on the laptop I installed it on. Wifi (including fn/enabled/disable buttons, and transitions between networks/wired/etc), suspend/resume, 3d acceleration/opengl, keyboard volume controls, etc all just worked. About the only thing that required futzing was the LCD brightness keyboard bindings were dorked (even though its a standard i3/etc machine) and the bluetooth was also broken. Three or four hours of recompiling modules, and messing with KDE/etc and everything on the machine worked. That made it the _ONLY_ laptop I've ever seen that worked without compromises in linux.

Fantastic experience, but with the 13.x series it seemed to go downhill a little. Enough that I stopped upgrading it because things break and I have to screw with it.

I wanted to like the leap concept, but it seems so many things were broken that the two days I spent trying to install it on a fairly normal x99 machine with a NVMe drive that I reverted it back to running it in a windows hosted VM.

I can't imagine what tumbleweed is like. Getting the kernel to boot and X to display graphics is just the first steps in my book. Plus, don't get me started on the UI changes. I want my desktop machine, and my servers to be _STABLE_. Screwing around with the bluetooth driver every time the kernel gets upgraded (or something similar) isn't something I want to be dealing with when I have actual work that needs finishing.

So, before someone tells me to try ubuntu/etc I'm going to say that I regularly run fedora/ubuntu/etc and they all have enough hangups that I continue to run opensuse based products at home (work has a different set of requirements, where I've been fedora/RHEL based recently rather than opensuse/sles).

Anyway, I really wish someone would take the leap type concept and stabilize the base OS/X/KDE and maintain it for a long time period while assuring that newer version of linux applications continue to work on that platform. You know, like windows (before 10). That way I won't have to worry that my 1 year old KDE version is to old to run a cd ripping application (or whatever).

Seems like a step forward in solving the "stale versus reliable" conundrum. Over the years I've repeatedly been irked by how stale the package repositories are in some distros. At the fresh end of the spectrum, I used Gentoo for a while, and I do like many things about Gentoo, but I came to the conclusion that it is essentially impossible to QA Gentoo. Plus, falling behind in Gentoo opens you to a world of hurt trying to update.

So I'll probably try Tumbleweed. I think the acid test will be how hard it is to update a few-months old installation. Testing each release is one thing -- testing all variations of update paths, again, leads to combinatorial explosion. Perhaps they have an update mechanism that deals with migration issues -- I'd like to understand how they approach that problem.

Is this guy leaving out periods as some kind of intentional stylistic thing, or did he just fail at proofreading? Lots of other typos too. A little ironic when you're writing about doing things correctly and testing comprehensively!

Things that prevented me from using OpenSuSE:

1. no single letter user name allowed in the installer

2. yast rewriting config files

3. I couldn't get the partitioning tool to do what I tried which is plain simple /boot plus encrypted swap and root.

OpenQA seems really brilliant, but I guess someone could eventually just port it to Arch, Gentoo, Debian, or Fedora Rawhide? I hope they do.

So for every library Foo, it tracks all of the packages that depend on Foo? What if I add my own package -- do I have to tell Foo about mine as well? What if Foo's API changed or breaks my package?

Well, this might just replace my current Debian setup as a daily driver. I've been wanting something like this for a while but had no idea how to do it technically in a feasible way. I guess you've done it for me.

Thanks for posting this and (if you still read this) the thorough followup in this thread.

I've stuck with openSuSE/SuSE since the early days, and doing Tumbleweed since about when it surfaced. There are several reasons I didn't switch over to Ubuntu (and a few reasons I wanted to, but the pros outweigh the downsides for me).

1. Active Directory: I'm not a Unix shop and everywhere I've had a need for it, AD has been the predominant identity service in the environment. Getting openSuSE setup, via yast, to work with my AD account is really simple. It can be done everywhere else, too, but being able to set it up during installation without touching a config file is nice.

2. Bleeding edge: I like to play and Tumbleweed was always on a later kernel (and other core bits) than other distributions, giving me access to the new toys early on with the "feeling" that I'm not running "beta" (and feelings aside, I've not run into anything on the stability, yet). Never having to think about doing a "distribution upgrade" (because you're basically doing it in pieces every time you update) is nice, too.

3. YaST: Much like the easy AD integration, there's a whole mess of administrative things that can be done without editing configuration files or using console tools that I'm not in nearly enough to memorize their usage. Simple things like opening a port in the firewall are as easy as they are on a consumer router and the ncurses interface is perfect over an SSH connection (I haven't used GUI YaST but it looks nice, too). People always say Ubuntu is the most "n00b" friendly Linux distribution, and it probably is when the large community behind it is factored in, but I find SuSE to be superior, personally.

On the downside, though:

There's less available in Zypper. I get jealous when every answer in StackExchange includes an apt-get and about 15% of the time no package even exists for whatever it is that I'm being told to apt-get. But it's little more pleasant to watch on the console.

The smaller community makes StackExchange less useful and they use different tools. Much of it is due to the bleeding edge nature of Tumbleweed and I've read plenty of "it's better, that old stuff will be deprecated everywhere else, too" and I can't speak to the merits of any of that, but when my network connection goes south, I instinctively reach for "ifconfig" and it's not there. And all of the help out there points me at things that don't work, either[1]. And because it's a rolling distribution, these kinds of changes don't pop up when you expect them (like when you're doing a distribution upgrade...)

Tumbleweed's rolling update model has thoroughly broken on me, once, but not in a "hey, it just decided not to boot this time" kind of way. I believe this happened when they switched to "Leap" and "Tumbleweed" as the only options. I thought I was up-to-date, but I was pointing to repos that were invalid and had to modify my configs and download an .rpm to fix it. Other than not seeing software updates (which is pretty odd since there's usually something every time I update), there was no indication that anything was wrong.

Out of the box, sudo isn't setup (maybe it is, now, I haven't done a fresh install in a long time). It's not hard to get working, though.

[1] It's one of the new "ip something" commands I can never remember when I need it: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networ...

With the recent announcement of Neon by KDE, and the rising popularity of Arch, and Fedora trying to get more modular (with multiple release versions) I can't help but feel the market is way oversaturated, but everyone is bringing something to the table better than everyone else. If we had a unified distro set rather than bascially four reimplementations of the same thing, we could be seeing a lot more momentum towards desktop Linux's adoption.

In general, there are two users of desktop distros:

A. Professionals and grandparents, who want stable, unchanging systems with long support. Think your SUSE Leap, your RHEL, your Ubuntu LTS, your Debian Stable, and kind-of-not-really Manjaro.[1]

B. Enthusiasts, developers, power-users, and gamers(!) who want the latest and greatest software. These are the SUSE Tumbleweed, Debian Testing, Ubuntu-nonLTS users (with a ton of PPAs), Fedora Rawhide, and Arch users. They don't want unstable software, they just want to get new stuff when the makers actually release it rather than have computers frozen in time - which in practice, no other OS actually does.

Nobody else is trying to ship an OS that intentionally holds back upstream released new releases, unless you consider the tiered versions of OSX / Windows / Android like that, except their availability is more based on your willingness to spend money / upgrade your device to get them than them just being delayed.

[1] I think there might be a schism between these two even further - grandparents probably want Neon style desktops just because individual distros are not honoring the release cadences of major projects like KDE or Gnome. Plasma 5.6 just came out and will not be in Ubuntu 16.04 alongside Qt 5.6, despite both fixing a tremendous number of bugs and issues with the desktop. That isn't cutting edge features, that is bug fixes, and I don't really believe in holding back major project releases like KDE or Gnome regardless of distro. Just have a switch to pin it if its corporate. But there is a tremendous lack of communication between upstream when major software projects like KDE cannot bugfix their major userbases at all for years (IE, Ubuntu LTS).

A great comparison would be to the Android world. Google devices see continuous releases for their support periods monthly now, like fixed release distros. Cyanogenmod has daily releases like a rolling distro. Any non-Google phone basically never gets updates and plays Debian Stable. But all of them, when using the Play Store, will upgrade every user facing APK on the system whenever updates are available, because those updates are not Google's responsibility, they are the developers, and users are used to knowing it is the app makers fault when something breaks, not the distributor (Google Play). General adoption of the Linux desktop requires this distinction be made, where developers can both easily offer their software to Linux users and be held responsible when they break it, rather than having everything filtered through distros that will basically throw the baby out with the bathwater by freezing all software because they trust nothing.

But on topic, it seems like we now have a half dozen different solutions to the same problem. Why can't I have a distro with SUSE's infrastructure, Ubuntu's brand and userbase, Debian's community, and Arch's software availability? It is like everyone has their own piece of the pie perfected but rather than us having a whole pie to solve any of these 2/3 use cases (I'd consider the server use case is extremely well provided for nowadays, the only domain Linux distros are doing a good job at, between RHEL / Stable / Ubuntu Server). It isn't even really about different distros for different desktops anymore, since pretty much every desktop is available on every distro - either officially like in Arch / Debian, or through the software universe of Ubuntu / SUSE / Fedora. The distinguishing factors are just the holes the other distros will not fill because they are too busy fixing another problem unaddressed at home.

It does not help that the work is then duplicated across all these projects. Packaging Qt and KDE are a pain in the ass, but there are four release teams between all these distros maintaining those releases independently. There is no actual way to fix this - the Debian, SUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch devs have already dug in within their camps - but it is still sad that desktop Linux remains niche because rather than working together and combining the best of everything we have everyone is working on their own thing while the whole is lackluster against the competition.

Yes, you should use weed.