On 9/2/22 07:11, Dave Howorth wrote:
I haven't thought about it too hard, because my main focus is stability and long support times, but AFAICT arch has much better documentation and it and the online support offered often answers questions I have about my Leap system. Opensuse has a decent community here but often very confusing documentation IME.
I've had Arch laptops, desktops and servers since 2009. Had fun watching the distro grow. A rolling release will never match the "reliability" of a release model -- but they come close. In 13 years, I've probably had only 3-4 issue that caused breakage -- but when they hit, you better be prepared to put the time in to resolve them -- and they always hit at the wrong time (like on vacation with the kids at Disney...) Linux 5.17 introduced an amdgpu bug that causes: [ 10.028870] BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000000 and the folks at Freedesktop could apparently care less. There are a dozen bugs open at Freedesktop.org and after months it is not yet assigned. It causes hardlock on reboot, so if you remote admin that box -- your screwed. It also depends on how you use your system. If you have NVidia, Virtualbox or other 3rd party requirements (or just non-regularly maintained normal apps), that's where a rolling-release hurts. Just ask the TW folks about NVidia issues that crop up on kernel updates. The basic problem is when some app or kernel is updated and forced updates to other parts of your system, unless the developers for the other parts keep up to date, then that part of your system breaks. Both Arch an openSUSE try and minimize this by staging and holding back some packages until it will play nice with the rest -- the rest being being the distro packages, not your 3rd party packages -- those may still break. The biggest test for a rolling-release is how long can you go without updates and still be able to update? There are changes that will come along that make updates problematic. If you can guarantee 2-3 months without problems, that's not bad. If you can guarantee 6 months that's great. Arch used to be able to go years between updates without issue, but changes to the package manager pacman has put fixed-points in the update timeline. (you can still move forward over years -- it just becomes much more involved) That said, I have 3 Arch servers, but I keep a 4th test machine (old Dell not worth much -- but a perfect test maching) that I update first to prevent being caught by surprise. Daily driver has always been SUSE/openSUSE since Mandrake -- just for the stability. I can't have a breakage "at the wrong time" and have to spend a day dorking with it. That's what will be lost when Leap goes away. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.