Tumbleweed? For a gamer and a tinkerer

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Hello all!

I am a fairly new Linux user, a Windows refugee.

I have tried a few distros, which helped me see what I like and don’t like.

This is what I have now:

Arch, with btrfs snapshots (which also show up in GRUB), secure boot, metapac for declarative package management (uses pacman under the hood, and is also cross distro), Steam, custom Proton (I use the CachyOS version and no, I don’t care about their kernel after some benchmarking). I installed a few other things but it’s mostly a gaming desktop where I do also some video production. Because I have an AMD RDNA 4 card, my mesa drivers need to be fairly recent.

But recently, after a BIOS update deleted my secure boot keys (I had used sbctl), and going down the shim + MOK route (which survives the BIOS updates) caused Windows to constantly ask for a new PIN, I have been considering going back to Fedora, which is what I used for a while before Arch.

I have fixed the secure boot thing in Arch, it’s just annoying to know that I will have to fix it again if the BIOS update in the future (it will only take me about 20 minutes, but it still makes me feel like I shouldn’t have to).

Fedora of course has secure boot and SELinux out of the box. Trying to get AppArmor set up on Arch made me want to throw my PC out of the Window, and in fact, I managed to mess it up and ended up having to chroot into my Arch to fix it :sweat_smile:

But I found a few niggles with Fedora that Arch doesn’t have when you install it with Archinstall:

  1. Codecs
  2. The mesa drivers fall behind towards the end of the 6 months cycle, that means I need to use a COPR
  3. Not hard to use a COPR (for example Fyra Labs is a pretty good one for that), but I just feel mesa is a core thing and I shouldn’t need to tinker to have the latest stuff
  4. I used to get some random Python crashes when using KDE, nothing seemed to actually ever break though; KDE on Arch just worked
  5. The btrfs subvolumes and snapshots would require manual set up that Arch does in a few clicks via Archinstall (I know how to do it in Fedora, it’s just laborious compared to Arch)
  6. Steam requires RPM fusion (I mean… It’s easy enough to turn on, but still)

Paradoxically, Arch installed with Archinstall gives me a system that just works in a way that is better than Fedora for me (due to the above). The only thing I need to do is install and activate the firewall and install Flatpak (one easy command). Discover comes installed with their default KDE installation, and it works after that. The sticking point mostly is secure boot… Which again I fixed, but something in the back of my head is saying it’s not a perfect solution and that little voice won’t shut up. I should also say that whenever Arch broke is because of something I did. Otherwise it has been rock solid.

However, take the AppArmor example, those things that I ended up breaking are rather difficult (for me at least) – and in that example Fedora and OpenSuse would mean I don’t need to worry. The secure boot thing, again, I didn’t even touch Arch this time, but I had to go fix it because of a BIOS update. While those aren’t Arch issues, they are Arch quirks. They are the result of the Arch philosophy. It’s a philosophy that I love until I don’t, and that takes me back to Arch when something else has a different philosophy I don’t like… I can’t win :stuck_out_tongue:

I was considering perhaps trying OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It comes with SELinux, btrfs snapshots and is a rolling release.

But given that Leap dropped support for 32 bit (yes I know you can turn it on), I wonder how long it will be before that happens to OpenSuse. I only care because of Steam, no other reason. I know there is the Flatpak, humour me and let’s say I want to install it via the distro package manager as it has some advantages (happy to use Flatpaks for other stuff).

I also wonder how much faster Tumbleweed is compared to Fedora, last time I checked it out their kernel version was the same as Fedora’s (6.15 something), where Arch and NixOS were both on the latest (6.16 I think). Again because some of these kernels improve driver support, I would like to be on the latest. Also I seem to recall their mesa drivers were behind.

Has anyone tried Tumbleweed and Arch and how easy is it to tinker in Tumbleweed? How are community repos? How do they compare with COPRs generally speaking? How is dependency handling? I heard it can be dependency hell with some community repos on Tumbleweed, but I don’t know where those comments came from, and the user I saw mention this didn’t specify what they were trying to install.

I would love to know about your experiences.

Thanks!

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I’ve noticed a surge in news about a recent mass migration from Windows 10 (EOL) to Linux.

Welcome to the forums. That’s a solid setup you’ve built already. Fedora will definitely give you a smooth ride with secure boot and SELinux. While Arch’s flexibility is hard to let go of once you’ve tuned it to your liking.

Tumbleweed could be a good middle ground if you want rolling updates without as much manual overhead, though it’s not quite as bleeding edge as Arch. Good repo management goes a long way there. Also check out https://vanillaos.org/ and Slowroll.

Looking forward to hearing how your testing goes.

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Welcome to our humble community @Trinity Doesn’t Suse have a live cd? so you can “try before you buy” sort of thing?

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Heya!

Thanks!

I figured that would be the case, I was just wondering how the dependency resolution would be with the extra repos! I heard it can cause some dependency issues. With Fedora installing proprietary codecs alongside the COPR with the more up-to-date drivers was causing me some headaches.

I checked out Vanilla, the main issue I had was that their mesa stack was fairly behind and I figure Slowroll might be the same?

I ended up installing it on a separate drive last night to do that :joy: That way I can try it over a period of time, and also benchmark my games.

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die hard tinkerer ? go debian
gamer try bazzite it has insane gaming& tweaks patches ,modified mesa, kernel,drivers to boost your gaming performance

don’t expect everything works by picking random linux distribution

if you want both go archlinux and don’t use archinstall
build system package by package and end result won’t disappoint you.

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Tumbleweed has been very solid and a true rolling release, meaning that you can install it once and update it on a consistent basis with few, if any concerns.

I’ll admit that I don’t have it installed right now but I was contemplating doing just that. It’s a question of deciding where and when I’ll be replacing another distribution with openSUSE Tumbleweed.

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Since I wrote the above I DID install openSUSE Tumbleweed and it’s working very well.

Zypper dup works well. I’m not a gamer though so I have no insights with that. Tumbleweed is an excellent all purpose system so it probably will do the job very well.

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So I have used it since and I am a bit torn.

A lot is set up out of the box, which is great. However there is some software that is not available in Tumbleweed.

The main thing is that DKMS is not supported out of the box (it is on Arch and Fedora has akmods). Xone requires it and OBS has Xone in one of the community repos as it isn’t in their official ones. But it required some troubleshooting to make it work, which is not required on Fedora or Arch. In essence you need to tell it exactly which dongle you are using via symlink, which is not very user friendly and not something that I needed to do on other OSes. It was also a pain with getting it signed for secure boot.

Regarding DKMS I know there is a different system called KMP. The Xone package though didn’t mention that and didn’t come built with it, so I would have to learn more about this and whether I would have to build it, but I then have to become a package maintainer for that module, and it’s probably more work than me sorting out secure boot on Arch so that BIOS updates don’t reject it because I used sbctl.

I like the OBS in principle, it’s very easy to make your own repo. But for some software again, there was nothing in the official repos so I had to find someone’s random home repo and hope it’s okay. Very few comments on them, if at all, no voting, of course you can go read the spec file (as you would read the PKGBUILD in the AUR), but I found that some software didn’t work properly at run time even if it built in OBS. Also one package might appear several times in the OBS, and now you are checking whether that repo is trustworthy, whether it’s the version you need and whether it works at all (or if it’s a link from another repo, then you go to the repo it’s based on).

None of the declarative package managers I know support OpenSuse out of the box, so I had to modify one to work on it.

So the main issue here is that the software I want to use, being a bit fringe, has shown not to be as easy to get on Tumbleweed. And the package ecosystem is as important as the distro itself for me.

Codecs. It was my understanding you need to use the packman repo if you want the full proprietary ones. I have seen it discouraged on the OpenSuse forums, but unfortunately the open source ones aren’t as good. This is on par with Fedora, but Arch comes with them (this is when using archinstall). So I use packman and my mesa also gets replaced too. So now the mesa I get, while still the right version, is no longer being tested by OpenSuse’s QA. So I lose the benefit that it would have over Arch.

I ended up going back to Arch and figuring out how to make the signed shim work, so hopefully next BIOS update secure boot won’t bat an eye.

For sure Tumbleweed is a great general purpose distro, but once you move away from that a little, you then get into the realm of having to trust third party repos, losing the advantages it has over Arch. You then just have to do the same thing you have to do with Arch (inspecting packages and the maintainer), but it’s harder to do as you may have several copies and no central repo to do it from.

Engineering wise Tumbleweed is amazing, it just doesn’t fit me as a desktop user whose primary focus is gaming and video production.

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The big deal with Tumbleweed is that it is a general purpose distribution. By it’s very nature it’s going to be able to do a lot. In so doing, there have to be compromises made.

A system specifically designed for gaming must be very good in that area and it may be able to do other things, but I think that openSUSE Tumbleweed would be better every day for the general every day things.

That’s why we have to consider what we intend to do with our system to decide which features are needed and which systems best provide those features.

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But a gaming system is not worse at every day things. Unless it logs you into gamescope and nothing else I guess. Anyway this wasn’t about what’s better, just about whether I should swap to avoid some other issues. Having tried it, I decided to solve the other issues and not swap :slight_smile:

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@Trinity
what about running shining Fedora? The distro is very indicated for productivity and videogames, also is getting quite fast upgrades.

Might give it a try?

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