I was on Twitter the other day and raised this question:
Now, don’t get me wrong - openSUSE is a great project. About a year ago they came up with a new strategy of two openSUSE versions: Leap and Tumbleweed. Leap is somewhat of an LTS, with 3 years of support, including two minor versions upgrades. Tumbleweed on the other hand is a bleeding edge rolling distribution. This is a great strategy and all, but why would anyone use openSUSE over Ubuntu or CentOS if one is looking for stability? This dude stepped up:
And he turns out to be the openSUSE chairman. And Mr. Brown is making a big case for openSUSE Tumbleweed on his blog: Why You Should Use Tumbleweed. And he has been repeating this story around the web, promoting Tumbleweed and encouraging people to trust it and their automated testing. Obviously I have ot try myself and see how does it roll.
###Setting up Tumbleweed
openSUSE Tumbleweed is delivered in massive a DVD-sized .ISO file that act as the installation media. It is worth emphasizing that this media does not have a bootable live session, so if you need one before installation then use something else. The installation procedure is rather standard and does not differ very much from any other distribution. Defining the partition setup manually was even more cumbersome than usual.
As the desktop I chose KDE 5.8, but openSUSE ships Gnome (and others) as well. The Plasma 5 is finally getting stable, so I decided to give it another chance:
https://two.tappara.co/t/plasma-5-8-lts-making-kde-great-again/321
So the Tumbleweed is now installed and everything is OK so far. I will be making only the smallest amount of changes to the system, as the idea is to find out how steady does the Tumbleweed roll. The initial expression is good. The Plasma 5 desktop eats less than 400MB of RAM after first boot, and the setup runs fine on my aging Thinkpad X301. openSUSE Tumbleweed ships with a very basic Plasma 5 configuration, with only minimal customization.
So this is the day 1 of the long term test. Now we just need more miles and days on this setup. It is worth mentionng that openSUSE still ships without proprietary audio and video codecs, so that is something we need to look into in the very near future. I will be updating this thread regularly and let’s see how it goes.