this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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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 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.
I think it's partly an older packages you have to source new versions of elsewhere kind of issue, and that you don't have with a rolling release. Not entirely user error, but these types of distros suggested for newer users seems like just a way to push new users away the when the 1st major update and OS goes belly up. Ubuntu broke basically every major update before I moved away from it. Great for a server where you're not looking for new software/drivers and just want stability, horrible for a desktop IMHO.
This is my Tahoe as well. I love my distro because it has a huge package repository and it keeps everything very up-to-date. I read all the time the downside of both these things is “instability”. The thing is, I have not experienced that instability at all. In fact, it has been quite a bit more problem free than the less rolling, more heavily curated package distros that I used to use. Looking back, a big reason for that is that I used to install a lot of “unofficial” packages to work around either missing packages or packages that were just too old for my needs. I think these “unofficial” packages made my installation fragile and upgrades unreliable. In practice, my “unstable” and “expert only” distro has been much more stable and required researching solutions to problems less often.
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.