Next time someone tells you ...

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you can not run rolling release distributions.

All of pixl.us is now running on openSUSE Tumbleweed :smiley:

If it is good enough for servers. It is good enough for your desktop.

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You’re a mad man.

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Wow! I’m tempted to switch from Arch to this.

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Of course you can use a rolling release on servers, but should you? Most (admins) will say no, and I agree.

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I’ve been using Gentoo on servers for years now (over a decade actually), so I’m sure opensuse tumbleweed will do just fine :smiley: :+1:

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I’m already on Tumbleweed. :grin:

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You wouldn’t be the first Arch user who is a lot more happy with TW than they were before.

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How do you handle “continuous updates” on a server? I mean do you e.g. do daily automated/unsupervised upgrades? Do you need to configure/keep a lookout for some things (e.g. packages that must always upgrade together), or is that working out of the box. And as far as I see there’s no separation of “normal” upgrades and security ones, so I assume you need to upgrade very frequently.
I am not trying to skip doing my own research here, these are the kind of things you don’t find in docs, at best you might find it when digging through mailing lists. I am very curious, not so much for my servers, where I am very happy with debian stable, but for workstations - where debian testing/unstable is always on the edge of being stable enough for my taste. I was thinking maybe I could get some “insight” info from someone that’s clearly a very happy opensuse user :slight_smile:

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I do zypper dup once per day. With all my machines (hardware+virtual) this takes usually about 20 minutes. That keeps the amount of package changes each day low. So if something break i usually only have a handful or 2 of packages to check. If you only use Tumbleweed and no 3rd party repositories you could even just zypper dup when you see the announcement email from Dominique Leuenberger.

After each dup I run zypper ps to find all the services that still use updated libraries and restart those. that also means i use dbus-broker instead of dbus as i can actually restart that without rebooting. (it is still a bit rough on the desktop, but we can hopefully fix that one day)

As you see it is not hard.

if you want safeguards in the process:

  1. snapper exists. it is similar to windows rollback feature. it needs some planning for the partitioning but it easily allows you to go back on an upgrade
  2. even if you do not use snapper we have a tumbleweed snapshot service that allows you to grab older packages while the new ones are getting fixed.
  3. last but not least we have transactional updates + microos and yes people are using that as their desktop. Google finds you more resources on this.
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You’ve convinced me, I’ll give it a try during the upcoming holidays.