On 8/11/24 2:17 PM, Marc Chamberlin via openSUSE Users wrote:
As a user I SIMPLY CAN'T BE AN EXPERT IN EVERY TOOL I NEED, AND HAVE TO SUPPORT THAT TOOL BY HAVING IT DUMPED ON ME! IMHO your response is rather callous,
<it's Friday> Oh how true. There are a few corollaries that apply: - jack of all trades, master of none - if you play golf, your tennis game will suffer and on and on. One of the most appreciated efforts from SUSE/openSUSE during my two decades of involvement was the "Evergreen" project. This kept certain releases updated and repositories available long after EOL. The benefit was it prevented users from being whipsawed out of a working release at EOL and allowed them the benefit and courtesy of choosing when to update to the next version. Many factors come into play, but by far the most pressing is work-stoppage experienced jumping from one release to the next. This is more acute for users with highly tweaked and tailored installs which can literally take days if not weeks to re-perfect on a new release -- running down versions changes, package changes and most importantly "the crap that breaks that nobody can explain (see fn1)". While evergreen was user-supported there was also support for it from opensuse in resources, buildservice, repos, etc.. Here, much of that same benefit could be provided by SUSE simply by not taking repos down. That takes no effort. What is confusing to users is when they look and see repos back to 12.3 still there, but repos for 15.4 have been taken down. I'm sure I don't understand it, but that, to a great extent, is where a bulk of the frustration comes from. Thankfully, buildservice still builds 15.4-TW by default. This isn't a criticism or a request to do A or B, merely a few points I feel are important to consider from the community's perspective. In the boxed-set days, there was no issue, you got your new boxed-set, installed and never looked back because each new release brought so much new functionality. That really hasn't been the case from 10.x forward. (yes, hardware support expands with each kernel -- to the point support for old hardware is now being dropped as well, and vulnerabilities are patched) but from a "I can do now do X on the new desktop" point of view -- there hasn't been new great "gotta have" killer feature in 20 years. It is easily understandable that someone with weeks of config tweaks in a working setup would try to avoid upsetting the apple-cart until there is a convenient time to upgrade. Leaving repos up really helps provide flexibility and options for that period of time. "duping" to the next release carries risk and many uncertainties, especially for highly tweaked installs. (and thank God for Linux - it's the choice it provides that allows you to tweak your install to perfectly meet you needs (fn2)) Food for thought. Maybe there is a happy medium somewhere that can help users like Marc, and myself on occasion, enjoy a little evergreen until time can be found to update. Footnotes :) fn1 - there is still a complete mystery why the USB MS-Mouse attached to my laptop no longer scrolls in TW with non-toplevel Gtk apps with focus-follows-mouse using libinput, but two-finger-scroll on the touchpad using synaptics continues to work just fine as it did in 15.4. So there is a subtle Gtk/libinput issue that detracts from the current experience that will likely take weeks or more to ultimately diagnose and resolve. Also, there is no native cinelera for TW (video editing is the last thing you want a containerized app to do). fn2 - chuckling as I check how my .bashrc has grown and the number of scripts I've written has proliferated: $ wc -l < .bashrc 870 $ find scr -type f | wc -l 991 </it's Friday> -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.