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12-8-2024

Shiny New Syndrome

So it's obvious from my past blog posts that I use openSUSE Tumbleweed. While I still love openSUSE (minus systemd) and all their associated technologies, I'm starting to seriously consider a switch from Tumbleweed down to Slowroll or perhaps Leap since Slowroll is still considered experimental.

Why, you may ask? Since the middle of November I've had a few random changes to Plasma that made me take time out of whatever I was doing just to fix. One lasted for weeks where the brightness of my monitor was set to 30% and I just couldn't figure it out. I only discovered today that it was because the "Brightness and Color" widget in the system tray seems to override the KDE System Settings energy section. I disable many of these widgets because they just do the same thing you'd expect to change in the system settings, but you can't get the Plasma folks to stop messing with things for no reason. This becomes the biggest gripe I have with the rolling release model. If you want to get work done, you don't need constant changes to your workflow. And no, GNOME people, I'm not going to use GNOME, but I would think this would also affect GNOME because it seems something is always changing in the desktop environment space. Regardless of what desktop environment you use, it should be the priority of the distribution to provide something that you can change at your will rather than bombard the user with updates that may include security fixes and so forth. I understand that whoever uses rolling releases do so voluntarily, but it is why I'm rehashing the times I used Debian/Devuan and somewhat enjoyed doing so for the very reason that they almost never change.

I don't mind crustiness, but there is a side of those kind of distributions that I really like. There is a certain predictability they have that successful operating systems like Windows have. Of course you will always need to have a "testing" branch so that you can continue to lead with your operating system but its called testing for a reason. It's the testing ground to build what is a reliable and stable foundation, whether it's RHEL or SLE. Anyway, more recently I've had an issue updating my system where the Plasma shell gets broken and I have to rollback using openSUSE's fantastic snapper rollback tool. It's been like this for a few days. Jumbled in the mix is an update to LibreWolf, which could certainly use the update (obviously, it's a good idea to keep a web browser up to date). Thankfully with zypper you can upgrade a single package which is what I've done, but since this is a rolling release there's no telling whether any other update in the mix is a security fix or not and I can't be bothered to see out of the hundreds of packages that TW suddenly pushed. With a static release, the updates are just security or bug fixes, and you usually don't have to be worried about a bombardment of hundreds of packages except for the switch from one static version to the next.

Let's talk about a common desktop activity: gaming. It is a common belief that gamers should use a rolling release because of updates to Mesa and other drivers that could enhance performance. In my experience though, the Mesa updates have been almost negligible. And people don't take into consideration that with Steam when you launch a game and it says "Processing Vulkan shaders", Steam is compiling the headers for the version of Mesa that you're constantly having to keep up to date. I've just disabled this because instead of happening once out of a few months it happens almost every single time I update Tumbleweed. My performance here has been about the same as when I used Devuan, and that's been several years ago with the same hardware, so all I'm trying to say is don't fall into this fallacy that newer = faster. Oftentimes we also see videos or news articles about some major update to a piece of software and want it immediately. This is what some call "Shiny New Syndrome". Think to yourself, "Do I really need that right this minute?"

This is really just a thought and a ramble. I may stay on Tumbleweed, I may not, but needless to say it's going to be an openSUSE distribution because there just isn't anything quite like them.