I like the concept. I've been rolling tumbleweed for a while with no issues except for Nvidia drivers, but combining the stability of a point release with the "install once" feature of a rolling release is nice.
OS Leap and Debian do a solid job with release upgrades, but applications can get out of date when you're getting close to the next release.
Same here. Nvidia troubles were one the main reasons I jumped ship from Tumbleweed.
I'm a little surprised at the focus on "install once", because I kind of thought my negative distupgrade experiences were a "me" problem. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I had a successful major upgrade on Linux. Totally nuked an Ubuntu install trying to upgrade from 20.04. Now I take major upgrades as an opportunity to hop distros again.
I kind of thought my negative distupgrade experiences were a “me” problem.
I mean I will say I've never had a failed distribution upgrade, so I think they are a bit of a you problem. Most likely related to some issues with specific packages you have installed and upgrading from version to version.
Tell me more about your Tumbleweed+NVIDIA problems. I'm on Leap 15.5, but with all this I've thought about moving over to Tumbleweed or Fedora. My card is NVIDIA, so I'm not looking for a big headache.
The kernel got updated fairly frequently in Tumbleweed, and more than once I had to manually uninstall and reinstall Nvidia drivers afterwards. Even that didn't work once, and I had to roll back the kernel version to get a working X session. At that point I pinned my kernel to that outdated version so it would not get updated again and I could move on with my life.
I also never figured out how I could get both the Nvidia drivers and other kernel modules (specifically ZFS) to function together.
This is why I grudgingly switched back to Ubuntu. Though to be fair, even Ubuntu LTS, with Nvidia drivers in the official repository, has its issues. For example, they had (and I think still have, though I haven't checked in a few months) incorrect dependencies so I could not install the latest drivers along with the latest CUDA libraries. I could either manually install everything from Nvidia or stick with older drivers in the official repos. Both methods come with their share of problems.
God I hate Nvidia drivers.
Yeah. I often kick myself for getting an nvidia card. My former distro was Ubuntu so I'm familiar with it from that end. I can see how having a constantly updating kernel could cause pain with the nvidia drivers. Even on leap or Ubuntu any tine the nvidia drivers updated it took a fair bit of extra time for regular apt/zypper processing kernel stuff and whatnot.
im going to keep a sharp eye on slowroll. I might be crazy enough to (eventually) try to convert from leap 15.5 to tumbleweed to slowroll. If it all blows up I was probably going to have to do that anyway.
