Trying out openSUSE Tumbleweed

While distribution-hopping is common among newcomers to Linux, longtime users tend to settle into a distribution they like and stay put thereafter. In the end, Linux distributions are more alike than different, and one's time is better spent getting real work done rather than looking for a shinier version of the operating system. Your editor, however, somehow never got that memo; that's what comes from ignoring Twitter, perhaps. So there is a new distribution on the main desktop machine; this time around it's openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Most rational users simply want a desktop system that works, is secure, and, hopefully, isn't too badly out of date. Tumbleweed is not intended for those users; instead, it is good for people who like to be on the leading edge with current versions of everything and who are not afraid of occasional breakage. It's for users who like an occasional surprise from their operating system. That sounds like just the sort of distribution your editor actively seeks out.

More to the point, Tumbleweed is a rolling distribution; rather than make regular releases that are months or years apart, the Tumbleweed developers update packages individually as new releases come out upstream. Unlike development distributions like Rawhide, Tumbleweed does not contain pre-release software. By waiting to ship a release until it has been declared stable upstream, Tumbleweed should be able to avoid the worst unpleasant surprises while keeping up with what the development community is doing.

Installation and setup

Tumbleweed installation is mostly straightforward. Free-software purists may be a little discouraged by the two separate end-user license agreement screens that must be agreed to, and the fact that, by default, Tumbleweed installs five non-free packages (these include Adobe's ICC profiles, unrar, and MP3 support). Tumbleweed scores high in the "plays well with others" category; it recognizes other distributions on the drive and avoids overwriting them. It was also able to pick up some settings (/etc/fstab entries, for example) from other partitions. Those who want a mostly hands-free installation can have one, but the ability to tweak the details is there for those who want it.

One thing your editor did not test, for various reasons, was the distribution's Btrfs filesystem support. OpenSUSE has gone farther than most in its embrace and integration of Btrfs; it includes the Snapper tool for the management of snapshots. Playing with Btrfs under Tumbleweed is on the "future projects" list.

For the most part, Tumbleweed runs like a contemporary RPM-based distribution. It uses systemd, of course, though it would appear that the integration of systemd has a way to go yet; one quickly encounters services have not yet been set up with proper unit files yet. Configuration of some packages seems awfully quirky relative to some other distributions. For example, Apache has a complicated set of configuration files, but many of the important behavioral details are actually controlled by shell-script assignments in a file under /etc/sysconfig. There is surely some logic to moving configuration out of the daemon's native configuration files, but it can be highly confusing to people who are not used to it. Especially for users as easily confused as your editor.

Back in the early days, SUSE was known for its large selection of packages; it was once famous for requiring four CDs to hold the full set. The package selection is still large, and most of what your editor looked for was there, but there were some exceptions. These include the audacious audio player, PyPy, and the gscan2pdf utility. Some of these tools can be found in user-contributed packages, but, in your editor's experience, taking advantage of those packages is not always straightforward. They don't always install correctly, dependencies can be hard to get right, and some packages are more current than others. In the end, your editor has ended up installing tools from upstream source a bit more often than with other distributions.

Speaking of dependencies, openSUSE packagers tend to use them heavily, with little idea of optional add-on dependencies. When it became necessary to get a working version of pdflatex, the zypper tool came back with an eye-opening list of 1727 dependencies to install. These included almost every font and style file that anybody ever thought to package for TeX. Getting TeX onto a system is never a small task, but this seems unnecessarily overweight.

On the other hand, TeX users on Tumbleweed are much less likely to run into problems with missing fonts or style files. The Fedora installation is much smaller (117 packages), but the process of getting an actual document to build can be a long slog involving multiple runs to find out which missing package it's going to complain about next.

Zypper, incidentally, has been with SUSE for a long time and generally works as one would wish. One nice feature is its ability to list processes that are running with old versions of at least one package so that they can be restarted at a convenient time. On the other hand, it often seems to get into a conflict with pkgkit and tell the administrator the equivalent of "please try again later."

Running Tumbleweed

Software updates are packaged into "snapshots," which come out on a somewhat erratic daily-to-weekly schedule. Each update might feature a few minor package bug-fix updates, or it might replace an entire desktop environment. Snapshots are announced on the opensuse-factory list, and, in your editor's experience, tend to be safe to update to. The biggest problem your editor has seen on the list was an update that broke video in the proprietary VirtualBox hypervisor — sympathy for the victims was somewhat limited in this case.

The software distributed with Tumbleweed does indeed seem to be fresh. The distribution has been on the 4.7 kernel for a while as of this writing. Your editor, a user of the relatively obscure Claws Mail email client, watched with interest to see how long it would take the recent 3.14 release to find its way into an update; in the end, it only took a few days. It is fair to say that Tumbleweed is a good choice for those of us wanting to keep up with the current state of the art as long as the programs we are most interested in are in the repository — and they almost certainly are.

Like most rolling distributions, Tumbleweed doesn't bother with security updates or advisories. Releases with security fixes are simply folded into the next snapshot. Anybody wanting to keep a Tumbleweed system secure will need to keep up with the snapshots; there is no way to get only the security updates, since they are not called out in any special way. Again, that is simply how this type of distribution works; if one is not willing to keep up with a firehose of updates, one should pick a different sort of distribution.

Packages come out quickly, but they do appear to be created with thought and attention. One of your editor's litmus tests is to look at the Calibre package and see if its "phone home" behavior has been turned off. As distributed by upstream, Calibre generates a unique ID for each installation and regularly reports it to the mothership; disabling that sort of privacy antifeature is the sort of thing that we depend on distributors to do for us. And, indeed, the Tumbleweed Calibre package has that behavior turned off by default.

After approximately one month of use, Tumbleweed seems like a fine distribution. For the most part things just work, and it behaves like any other Linux system. Simply working as expected while featuring just-released software is a nice combination. Tumbleweed seems likely to keep on rolling on this particular system for some time yet.

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