To switch or not to switch, that is the question
Hello fellow lemmings! Fedora KDE user here, and quite happy about it, it didn't break a single time and packages are up to date. The only thing that bother me is DNF's speed... a single search may take up to 5 seconds, and if I'm dependency-hunting I may need several searches, summing up the delays. I'm asking if switching to openSUSE Tumbleweed could be a good idea or not. The idea of the rolling release is really intriguing, whole system upgrades always makes me nervous, and zypper, being written in C++, should be faster than DNF.
I would stick to Wayland KDE, as my current fedora setup.
Other than this, I don't see any other obvious pros or cons, so I'm asking you: why should I switch and why shouldn't I? any tips from someone who used both?
thanks in advance!
If you’re changing for the sake of package manager speed, don’t. The few seconds here and there don’t really amount to much.
However, tumbleweed, being a rolling release, to me, means that it kind of killed the distro hopping adiction. Everything is stable and updated frequently (albeit not bleeding edge, as to have time to test the packages)
It's not the only motivation, but the one that convinced me to look around after more than 2 years on fedora. The rolling release is another motivation
Then give tumbleweed a try! I think you’ll like what it offers.
Fedora also has a rolling release version called rawhide
I couldn't get on with TW when I tried it because because of very large updates, time-consuming updates appearing at random. Is that something you find? I prefer the predictability of Fedora.
The beauty of Tumbleweed is that you don't have to update straight away. I typically update weekly but on my play-puter I have gone 18 months between updates without a problem. The updates do tend to be quite large though so a slow Internet connection can take a long time to download them.
Isn't that a security risk, or can you easily choose to just apply security-important patches? That was the problem I had, I'd see a massive load of new packages and wonder "can I leave this for now or is one of those a critical patch?" On Fedora it's a no-brainer, I just do the upgrade every night and the big version update when I'm ready.
It's update all or nothing. Whether it's a security risk or not to leave it for a few days depends on your threat model and as much as I'd like to believe I'm important, mine's minimal.