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.