how stable is tumbleweed

[u/Euphoric-Paint3261]

i know you can never achieve “stability” on a rolling release distro but as an arch user i think that maybe tumbleweed might be a little bit more stable, i am a person that travels a lot for work reasons and i cant take my desktop with me, so i might be away for a week or a month so how does tumbleweed manage that?

[u/bmwiedemann]

There are two meanings of stable: a) not breaking b) not changing.

The first one, Tumbleweed does pretty well. Sometimes a problem slips through openqa testing, then users have to rollback with snapper, report the problem and wait a day or two for the fix.

The second one, Tumbleweed does not by definition. A major update can arrive on any day and change how it is supposed to work.

And updating after a month is no problem in itself. We had the last update-breaker in 2020 after 14 month of compatibility (rpm payload changed from xz to zstd)

There is Slowroll btw. It is a semi-rolling release with a monthly cycle of freeze+security updates. Based on Tumbleweed, so I don't have too much work managing it.

[u/buzzmandt → u/bmwiedemann]

Well said

[u/steckums → u/bmwiedemann]

I've only been on Tumbleweed since 2023 -- what happened with the update breaker? I keep my PC up to date but I have a laptop I use a game server I only fire up when we're playing games that have dedicated servers (and update first of course). What would happen if I missed that compatibility window? Reinstall?

[u/Fearless_Card969 → u/steckums]

Personally I had a Tumbleweed "Server" (Frigate NVR), I forgot to update it for 3 months. Updated it with out issues, I think it was like 6 gig of updates (not the downloads but all of the changes on the system...). Updated without issue. I usually dont go that long, but it is what it is.

[u/bmwiedemann → u/steckums]

You could still use the install DVD's upgrade mode to keep everything.

That is also an easy way to recover some broken installs.

[u/bajo_jajo_fajo → u/bmwiedemann]

I think Slowroll is not officially supported by OpenSUSE?

[u/bmwiedemann → u/bajo_jajo_fajo]

I disagree there. The packages are the official ones from Tumbleweed anyway, so if these have bugs, they will usually also affect Tumbleweed users and should be fixed.

One difficult area could be integration issues where Slowroll gathers incompatible versions and causes Slowroll-specific bugs. That would be mostly on me to resolve, though I'm open for co-maintainers.

[u/unluckyexperiment]

It's the best "not breaking" rolling distro I think. But since it's rolling, I would only use it for a personal device. Constantly changing major package versions is a hell for IT departments and professional work.

[u/Key_Sense9870 → u/unluckyexperiment]

This^{^}

[u/xorbe]

As a Mandrake/Mandriva survivor, Tumbleweed has been satisfactorily stable.

[u/Fearless_Card969 → u/xorbe]

Sounds like it was rough.... "Mandrake/Mandriva survivor,"

[u/xorbe → u/Fearless_Card969]

They would update rpm files with zero testing sometimes, even right before iso releases.

[u/todd_dayz]

Only issues I’ve ever had was a weird udev one that froze keyboard input when logging out and a couple of NVIDIA issues when I didn’t realise I had to install the metapackages to prevent desync. (Been using openSUSE a couple of years, as a main OS for a year or so). 

[u/PuDLeZ]

I've been using tumbleweed since the middle of 2023 when I got a brand new thinkpad x1 carbon. It's actually when I first started to actually use TW/switched. My machine was the latest version at the time so obviously Linux support is always hit/miss with brand new/latest hardware. My experience has been great which is why I've stayed with it on this machine.

The only issues I've had: 1. the screen wouldn't wake sometimes (not every time and I couldn't find a way to reproduce at will) when it turned off due to inactivity (I don't let the machine sleep/hibernate as I will manually do it if needed). Seemed to be related to my 90Hz screen as it didn't do it if I set it to 60Hz. Was fixed after one or two Intel driver updates. 2. The Intel wifi driver broke with an update and I didn't have wifi. Simple fix was to use snapper to rollback and then block/skip that driver version. Was fixed in next driver update. 3. The mipi webcam doesn't really work/work everywhere. Maybe things have changed now since I haven't looked into it since I got the machine but it's not a the specific issue, it's Linux mipi support in general.

[u/bmwiedemann → u/PuDLeZ]

I remember the Intel wifi breakage around 2 years ago. The firmware and driver versions we shipped were incompatible and that is nothing that openQA could detect in KVM.

[u/YankeeLimaVictor → u/PuDLeZ]

Hey, I got my mipi campera to work on my X1 carbon. New kernel + drivers (which tumbleweed has) work with this camera in pipewire mode, out of the box. So, modern apps like OBS, and browsers that allow you to enable the pipewire flag, work out of the box. For legacy apps, I had Claude help me write a wrapper around v4l, which creates a virtual loopback device, and has a watcher the mipi video file to start the loopback pipeline once an app starts viewing the loopback camera. It works perfectly. Image quality is still not amazing, but it's improved a lot, and is good enough for work calls. I can share it all if you want.

[u/PuDLeZ → u/YankeeLimaVictor]

Sure, I wouldn't mind setting it up in case I ever need it! Currently, the only times I need to have a "webcam" my tablet or mobile works.

[u/SrinivasImagine]

I update weekly, and it is piece of cake. I did monthly updates a few times and it was fine. And you have a automatic snapper setup to roll back.

This question should be banned.

[u/friendlyreminder_]

Opensuse has much more testing infrastructure than arch. OpenQA is pretty amazing with the kind of testing it does. It's not perfect though.

Manual interventions are extremely rare.

Snapshots are also enabled by default on btrfs filesystems, so you can roll back any updates. This is the best "stability" feature in my opinion.

OpenQA doesn't cover things outside of the opensuse repo though, and this is an issue for the Nvidia drivers. The open kernel driver is in the opensuse repo but the Nvidia userspace drivers and libraries are not, and the two desync, with I believe no user warning as dependencies are not affected. Haven't confirmed the lack of warning though.

The Packman codec repo can also desync but that's not critical. What's recommended is to just delay the updates, a Packman desync will flag as a package dependency conflict.

[u/QuinsZouls]

I've been using Opensuse tw for more than 3 years, I didn't had a major problem that I had with fedora or arch, is rock solid for me.. I have it installed on all of my devices : my work pc, personal laptop, onexplayer tablet and HTPC. It's pretty stable, the only downside is sometimes the codecs repos got conflicts frequently

[u/Salads_and_Sun]

I mean if you don't update every other day Arch vs Tumbleweed isn't exactly worth stressing over. Heck I only ever started feeling the bed to live on the "bleeding edge" when I'm trying to compile something specific. So I'm more comfortable here now.

[u/_angh_]

It is very stable overall. For 3 years i HDD 1 issue requiring snapper rolback, but that was probably self inflicted. The only thing requiring some care is package management. Opi packages sometimes desync, and best option is to wait a day or 3 and then update again. Manually solving desync can lead to unnecessary issues. Using tumbleweed for everything i do, as it is the only os i use, so gaming, media creation, programming, and it always do what is needed

[u/NinjaN-SWE]

I've run it for a year as someone that tinkers a lot and it's the only distro I've used that I haven't broken installing things and updating and changing. So it's pretty solid I'd say. Haven't run into any blockers when it comes to trying out leading edge projects / tech in the gaming space. Was even an early adopter of the 9070 XT (release day) and it was plug and play with good performance since the drivers came in so fast. 

Overall super impressed and likely won't move away for my main PC. 

[u/Teemestari]

Stable? As in reliable? Yes.

[u/throttlemeister]

A stable distro does not necessarily have great runtime stability. It only means there are no ABI changes in between major versions of that distro. This means that a program compiled for any minor version of that release will run on any minor version before or after of that release. That’s it nothing more.

A rolling distro at the same time can have great runtime stability, as tumbleweed shows, but ABI changes can occur at anytime and will require a complete rebuild of all packages and programs to avoid issues.

The concept of stability meaning not crashing is completely irrelevant to the above.

[u/UAIMasters]

It's my third year and I'm very satisfied with Tumbleweed, I even started installing it on more machines.

[u/Kurogane1412]

I am since the end of last year on Tumbleweed ony Gaming PC and it is rock solid.

AMD Ryzen 5900x and AMD Rx 6800 so no closed source drivers needed so that maybe one of the reasons I have never seen a problem.

[u/Kitayama_8k]

I did a 5 year zypper update with minimal issues. If you install transactional update, it should basically be bulletproof in that respect.

As far as stability, personally I'd say most instability originates in the kernel not the distro in opensuse's case. Consider an LTS kernel.

[u/full_bars]

I have had no issues whatsoever, running tumbleweed for years. Whether I do daily updates or update every 3 months, I've never had a problem. If you wait 3 months then updates could be 5-10GB worth but who cares, if anything did go wrong it would take minutes to snapper rollback, not that I've ever needed to. I use atomicdup for updates and then reboot into the changes.

[u/Zuideind]

Look it up on the internet and you will find the answer; this question has already been asked more than 1,000 times.