miauz genyau (mia@movsw.0x0.st)'s status on Sunday, 11-Jun-2023 18:56:37 JST

@Polychrome@poly.cybre.city i think so.

it’s reasonably up-to-date and has more packages in the main repo than arch linux. packages follow whichever update policy their maintainers deem appropriate—e.g. the mpv package is built from git snapshots rather than releases because that’s also the upstream recommendation, while other packages might lag behind a bit more to avoid problems.

its approach to “rolling” release is to release in snapshots: packages are built and automatically tested with openQA, which runs VMs to simulate interactive scenarios and analyzes screenshots to find potential breakage before the decision to release a snapshot is made. also, whenever a package changes, everything that depends on it will be rebuilt recursively until the output no longer changes, ensuring consistency.

the repositories and their mirrors are also kept in a consistent state, so unless a snapshot has been published with unmitigated build failures, you don’t end up in a situation where you can’t install packages due to unmet library version dependencies, which it tracks properly such that partial updates are possible (i.e. you don’t have to upgrade your entire system because you want to install some software). older repository snapshots are accessible via tumbleweed-cli, with a 1-month history. skipping updates for years or switching between tumbleweed and leap (stable distro) also isn’t really a problem; it handles those scenarios well.

so overall, it’s a pretty reliable rolling distro that rarely breaks.

there is nothing quite comparable to the AUR, but users can host their own repos with packages building on opensuse infra at build.opensuse.org. contributing to the main repo is strongly encouraged and relatively easy—anyone can submit packages and fixes to the maintenance projects.

one thing to keep in mind is that due to licensing/patent issues, things like multimedia codecs are restricted in the main repos and on OBS. however, the packman repos independently hosted in europe build from the same package sources (the build service instances federate), except with patented codecs enabled, so their packages are drop-in replacements. likewise with nvidia drivers (license prohibits redistribution), but nvidia has an official repo for tumbleweed, and the packages use scripts to automatically build the kernel modules for all installed kernel versions, making dkms unnecessary.


its community is not centered around a decisionmaking committee, but changes are proposed (ideally via proof of concept) and discussed by whoever is interested. it’s all pretty drama-free in my experience because bikeshedding is avoided, even with “highly controversial” stuff like the systemd migration back in the day.