Why You Should Use Tumbleweed
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Why You Should Use Tumbleweed
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Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed
#2So 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.
Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed
#3So 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.
It is a rolling release, that means each time a new version of a package is available they will try and incorporate it. Apparently the difference they have to gentoo, arch et al is that they have a large CI that actually inspects screen shots to verify that the new package didn't break anything.
I run antergos (arch based) at home, having the bleeding edge is nice, but the AUR is really what seals the deal for me. That being said I have been cut by the bleeding edge at least twice, once so badly that it booted up without the eth0 interface. Maybe tumbleweed wouldn't have this problem as often.
Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed
#4So 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.
That doesn't sound very different from Debian Sid: new and updated packages are rolled in as they come through. This means fairly frequent breakages, especially for complex stacks.
A lot of Debian-based distributions (including the first Ubuntu releases) are basically Sid snapshots at some point in time. It's been like that for a long time.
Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed
#5So 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.
It is a rolling release, that means each time a new version of a package is available they will try and incorporate it. Apparently the difference they have to gentoo, arch et al is that they have a large CI that actually inspects screen shots to verify that the new package didn't break anything. I run antergos (arch based) at home, having the bleeding edge is nice, but the AUR is really what seals the deal for me. Th…
It's probably worth mentioning that the openSUSE Build Service pretty much fills the same role as AUR
http://software.opensuse.org lets you search across all the available repositories and easily install packages on your Tumbleweed installation
Sure, those repositories are not tested, unlike the main Tumbleweed distribution, but then again, AUR isn't exactly expected to be a wholly reliable resource, just a useful one :)
Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed
#6Seems 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.
Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed
#7So 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.
That doesn't sound very different from Debian Sid : new and updated packages are rolled in as they come through. This means fairly frequent breakages, especially for complex stacks. A lot of Debian-based distributions (including the first Ubuntu releases) are basically Sid snapshots at some point in time. It's been like that for a long time.
Well, aren't they saying this is Sid but with good QA?
Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed
#8So 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.
That doesn't sound very different from Debian Sid : new and updated packages are rolled in as they come through. This means fairly frequent breakages, especially for complex stacks. A lot of Debian-based distributions (including the first Ubuntu releases) are basically Sid snapshots at some point in time. It's been like that for a long time.
Apart from Debian Sid: has no testing, but Tumbleweed does - so those breakages don't happen
Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed
#9So 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.
It is a rolling release, that means each time a new version of a package is available they will try and incorporate it. Apparently the difference they have to gentoo, arch et al is that they have a large CI that actually inspects screen shots to verify that the new package didn't break anything. I run antergos (arch based) at home, having the bleeding edge is nice, but the AUR is really what seals the deal for me. Th…
CI tests as described are very good for minor patches, but new features and significant UI changes seem to require significant manual updates to tests anyway.
Re: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed
#10Seems 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 tryin…
zypper takes care of most of that for us - it really is an exceptional package manager
We have some tests in openQA that keep an eye on upgrades, as well as some users who like to stagger their Tumbleweed updates for some weeks.
I think the record I heard was like 3 months (and our gcc5 migration happened during those months), and then they upgraded with no problem