openSUSE Has A Problem, Is Seeking New Direction

[Awesomeness]

I hope they do not go the Rolling route. I have yet to see a rolling distro with good QA.
However, if they pull off a well working rolling release distro, I'll end up being fine with it.

[Wyatt]

Thanks, that's good to know. I'll try Gentoo again soon.

To clarify the above just a trifle, it's trivial to make it a "Free" distro by setting ACCEPT_LICENSE="-* @FSF-APPROVED" in make.conf (though most of us aren't really clear on why you'd want that). In a sense, it's BSD-ish: "here's a bag of tools, do what you want".

[LenS]

Nope. Our ethos is of user choice; pragmatism is what we do. Even our more churlish developers aren't so spiteful as to attempt to dictate what choices you have. Skype 4 is already in the Portage tree as of yesterday (that's the earliest I noticed it). Heck, we even have people trying to get systemd working, despite having OpenRC already.

Suffice to say, if they're looking to commit to rolling release, they could do far worse than looking to Gentoo for inspiration (or just rebase on us; we could absorb their patch flow easily).

Thanks, that's good to know. I'll try Gentoo again soon.

[Wyatt]

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

Nope. Our ethos is of user choice; pragmatism is what we do. Even our more churlish developers aren't so spiteful as to attempt to dictate what choices you have. Skype 4 is already in the Portage tree as of yesterday (that's the earliest I noticed it). Heck, we even have people trying to get systemd working, despite having OpenRC already.

Suffice to say, if they're looking to commit to rolling release, they could do far worse than looking to Gentoo for inspiration (or just rebase on us; we could absorb their patch flow easily).

[LenS]

Because what's a "Gentoo", right? (Hint: Sabayon is pretty much Gentoo unstable with a few extra ebuilds. And no QA.)

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

[Wyatt]

...though if you want the newest video driver blobs and kernel it's the only option.

Because what's a "Gentoo", right? (Hint: Sabayon is pretty much Gentoo unstable with a few extra ebuilds. And no QA.)

[LenS]

Tumbleweed

Going to a rolling release is not a realistic option; Tumbleweed is designed to be based off of something, not to roll forever. If the problem OpenSUSE has is integrating, a rolling release will just make things worse, not better. Disallowing certain repositories or creating parallel update paths also sounds like a recipe to make the distro more complicated to use.

OpenSUSE is already running an 8 month release cycle and it has achieved great polish and stability from it... except for the last 12.1 release, which simply wasn't in a releasable state and needed at least 6 more weeks of bug-fixing. Now it sounds like 12.2 is in even worse shape, but at least the team is admitting it and looking for answers. The simplest answer may be switching to a yearly release cycle and then work on internal development and testing processes. Slamming code out as soon as its released (what Sabayon essentially does) destroys the ability to test or polish OpenSUSE and simply doesn't fit with the mission statement of OpenSUSE, which is to favor stability over features.

I'm not sure what you mean by:
"Tumbleweed is designed to be based off of something, not to roll forever".
It's a rolling release of opensuse. It's been rolling for years now.

I found opensuse updates the kernel almost as soon as new ones are released. KDE updates take longer to reach the repos. Sabayon was just the opposite and took much longer to update the kernel, but KDE was updated almost immediately. At least with mostly open source, I also have Flash, Tumbleweed has worked well for me. Sabayon not so much, though if you want the newest video driver blobs and kernel it's the only option.

[alcalde]

I've been using opensuse tumbleweed for over a year now with little problems. For awhile on one computer with a newer AMD video card the desktop kernel loaded a corrupt desktop, but booting into the default kernel was fine. Eventually this was fixed in a new kernel.

Sabayon uses a rolling release and has the distinction of also being the only one including AMD's and Nvidia"s binary blobs in their updates. Sooner or later however, an update will completely crash the system. I've had no such problem with opensuse, but I'm using open source drivers only. If they went to a rolling release model it seems that zypper and yast could be programmed to update systems with binary and open source drivers differently or not easily allow certain repositories to be enabled for systems with the blobs.

I tried my first serious switch from Windows to Linux with Sabayon, and I ran into two updates in six months that left me unable to start the desktop (and lots of instability even when I could). I was about to give up on Linux and upgrade Windows instead when I decided to try one last time with a just-released OpenSUSE. OpenSUSE and its stability and polish are what got me to leave Windows behind.

Going to a rolling release is not a realistic option; Tumbleweed is designed to be based off of something, not to roll forever. If the problem OpenSUSE has is integrating, a rolling release will just make things worse, not better. Disallowing certain repositories or creating parallel update paths also sounds like a recipe to make the distro more complicated to use.

OpenSUSE is already running an 8 month release cycle and it has achieved great polish and stability from it... except for the last 12.1 release, which simply wasn't in a releasable state and needed at least 6 more weeks of bug-fixing. Now it sounds like 12.2 is in even worse shape, but at least the team is admitting it and looking for answers. The simplest answer may be switching to a yearly release cycle and then work on internal development and testing processes. Slamming code out as soon as its released (what Sabayon essentially does) destroys the ability to test or polish OpenSUSE and simply doesn't fit with the mission statement of OpenSUSE, which is to favor stability over features.

[LenS]

Repositories

I disagree. Tumbleweed is an ugly, unholy mess. Have you seriously tried it? I switched openSUSE 12.1 to use the Tumbleweed repository and it was a major PITA to begin with. Then, after sucessfully switching to Tumbleweed there simply weren't enough updates to legitimate the step at all. I don't know , could be that this is perfectly normal to you openSusers. But for everybody else this is just not acceptable when you can haz Debian.

Just curious, but how many repositories did you have enabled? I've never had any problems in over a year with just the 3 Tumbleweed repos enabled.

[LenS]

Opensuse-Tumbleweed

I've been using opensuse tumbleweed for over a year now with little problems. For awhile on one computer with a newer AMD video card the desktop kernel loaded a corrupt desktop, but booting into the default kernel was fine. Eventually this was fixed in a new kernel.

Sabayon uses a rolling release and has the distinction of also being the only one including AMD's and Nvidia"s binary blobs in their updates. Sooner or later however, an update will completely crash the system. I've had no such problem with opensuse, but I'm using open source drivers only. If they went to a rolling release model it seems that zypper and yast could be programmed to update systems with binary and open source drivers differently or not easily allow certain repositories to be enabled for systems with the blobs.