openSUSE Has A Problem, Is Seeking New Direction

[Cyber Killer]

Then OpenSuse users could kiss dist-upgrades and release-cycles goodbye ~ which is a good thing, IMO.... i wouldn't even consider using a distro that has 6month or even yearly releases. it's 2012 - we shouldn't have to re-install an OS every six months to a year, it's a bit of a joke, really.

I don't really understand the idea of 'i need to reinstall cause there's a new release' - like wtf? Just do an upgrade. Either from the repos or from a new install cd, you can always make an upgrade to your working system and it will be working as good as it was.

[GreatEmerald]

Reinstallation can be time consuming and annoying, but if you don't reinstall often, you're really missing out, because over time things like old configuration pile up and don't work right with newer software. Every time I do a reinstall, the system gets more stable, faster, unified, and I learn something new about the system in the process. Also, like I mentioned before, reinstallation is a natural breakpoint for updating some of the core features. Last time I reinstalled my primary OS, I switched from ALSA to PulseAudio. Before that was a switch from SysVinit to systemd. And before that a switch from EXT4 to Btrfs. It seems that it will continue to be that way in the future, too, as the next openSUSE release will see a GRUB switch from legacy to 2. You normally would miss out of those developments if you didn't reinstall. And a long enough time passes with software evolving fast enough between releases that there is usually something new to try out on each of them.

And, of course, if you don't have time or are lazy, you can always upgrade. And if that doesn't work, then there is always your /home partition that saves all of your configuration anyway.

[Wyatt]

I don't really understand the idea of 'i need to reinstall cause there's a new release' - like wtf? Just do an upgrade. Either from the repos or from a new install cd, you can always make an upgrade to your working system and it will be working as good as it was.

Except it's exceedingly rare for a dist-upgrade to actually work without breaking a buch of crap (subtly or overtly). Really, this is well documented at this point; you're either new to this, fairly skilled at unbreaking things, or preternaturally fortunate.

In any event, people reinstalling when distro "versions" change is a common thread even among people who are reasonably good at admin simply because fixing everything is a time-consuming pain in the ass.

[Cyber Killer]

I've been using GNU/Linux since 2001, I'm a professional sysadmin. I customize my system to a large degree that after a reinstall it takes a lot of time to get everything up and running they way that I like. Because of this I treat a reinstall as a completely last resort.

Also from all the distros that I was using in the past, there was only one that needed frequent reinstalls after an upgrade has gone bad - namely Kubuntu. It's because the *buntu team is so fixated on releasing on time that they keep a hoard of nasty bugs on release. Postponing the releases in favor of getting issues fixed is something I greatly value in openSUSE. I don't care if it takes a month longer to wait for a release if it means that it'll be rock solid as it needs to be.

Anyway - dist upgrades are ok, as long as we're not talking about *buntus (and even they improved on this in the past couple releases).

[Nevertime]

Would a rolling release be any better upgrading in small chunks over an 8 month period than a upgrade every 8 months if distro upgrades are so poor?

[Wyatt]

I've been using GNU/Linux since 2001, I'm a professional sysadmin. I customize my system to a large degree...

So the second one. See, it's important to realise that people like you and I are outliers. So even fixing trivial things like a bad X config are beyond the ken of most users when they can't even access documentation (because they don't, for the most part, know how to live in a TTY-only world).

Would a rolling release be any better upgrading in small chunks over an 8 month period than a upgrade every 8 months if distro upgrades are so poor?

No, at least for Gentoo's stable users breakage is pretty rare, and only when upstream does something exceptionally dumb (libpng, for example). And even then, a lot of time gets spent on making it as painless as possible.

[devius]

So the second one. See, it's important to realise that people like you and I are outliers. So even fixing trivial things like a bad X config are beyond the ken of most users when they can't even access documentation (because they don't, for the most part, know how to live in a TTY-only world).

I agree with you that the chances of a lot of crap getting broken with an upgrade is very high. However I don't think that people who fix their own computers are so rare in the linux world. The first time I ever installed a linux distro on my own I had no knowledge whatsoever about how *nix work and I had to work around the fact that the installer couldn't detect my soft-raid array.

People who don't fix their computers when using linux distros also don't fix them with "other" operating systems. There's always a friend who knows how to do it and that will be willing to help. What is lacking is probably professional support in computers stores for users who would like to use linux distros but can't be bothered to fix their system if something goes wrong.

[chithanh]

I always thought Gentoo was strictly open source, but I'm not that familiar with it, so I could be wrong.

Gentoo is about choice and providing the tools that enable users to choose what they want. You can tell the package manager which particular licenses are acceptable to you and which aren't.

That said, we have a policy that proprietary software is not going to hinder the progress of Gentoo. And expect no sympathy if you face issues that arise from using proprietary software. So if there is a new X server that doesn't work with your proprietary graphics driver, or if blue faces appear in YouTube videos thanks to latest Flash, that is strictly your problem.

[ninez]

Reinstallation can be time consuming and annoying, but if you don't reinstall often, you're really missing out, because over time things like old configuration pile up and don't work right with newer software. Every time I do a reinstall, the system gets more stable, faster, unified, and I learn something new about the system in the process. Also, like I mentioned before, reinstallation is a natural breakpoint for updating some of the core features. Last time I reinstalled my primary OS, I switched from ALSA to PulseAudio. Before that was a switch from SysVinit to systemd. And before that a switch from EXT4 to Btrfs. It seems that it will continue to be that way in the future, too, as the next openSUSE release will see a GRUB switch from legacy to 2. You normally would miss out of those developments if you didn't reinstall. And a long enough time passes with software evolving fast enough between releases that there is usually something new to try out on each of them.

I think in a binary distro, this (sort of) applies but definitely is not universal for distros and certainly not true of rolling releases. Using Archlinux, none of what you are saying really applies. The 'core' system will continue to be updated, 'old' configs don't pile up and break new software, etc. In the case of things like PA, systemd, grub, etc ~ none require a 'fresh' install - in fact, any of those take no more than just a few minutes to setup (i setup systemd, on a 2yr old Arch system, a few days ago). BTRFS - depending on what you are doing might require a fresh install, but other than that none of these things require a fresh install to work properly.

[devius]

Using Archlinux, none of what you are saying really applies. The 'core' system will continue to be updated, 'old' configs don't pile up and break new software, etc. (...), but other than that none of these things require a fresh install to work properly.

That's the exact opposite of my experience with Arch. For the first few months things worked wonderfully, but after a few more months stuff began to break, packages began depending on other packages that weren't updated at the same time or that were updated but had a bug that broke something... in the end, when I finally gave up, my desktop was practically useless (it was KDE though, so I give Arch the benefit of the doubt in this case).