Most people don’t give much thought to their operating system, but with Windows 10 support ending in October 2025, many will start searching for alternatives...
Latest Tumbleweed snapshot has a Mesa bug that causes 50% chance of black screen after login. A few weeks before that Plymouth was broken causing >1 minute boot times. To solve these issues users need to learn how to rollback updates from command line, so it’s certainly not a good replacement for Windows.
I know it’s rolling release distro but you can’t claim “it’s rolling release so bugs are expected and it’s your fault for using it” and “it’s betest and stablest system ever, everyone should use it” at the same time.
I also have AMD and do updates regularly and didn’t have this issue, but I think the problem is pretty apparent and has been for quite some time. Packman repository should not be used by non-knowledgeable users! I am not exactly sure what that means for daily use, but as seen here it creates issues if you are not aware what an update actually does or just press “yes, yes, yes” to all questions in an update process.
In regards to plymouth I have no clue, but it seems this should be easily manageable by booting into a previous snapshot?
The Plymouth bug resulted in my install failing to boot. Holding the grub shortcut to show the boot menu did not work, so I had to boot from a USB, decrypt the drive, mount the logical volumes, chroot, update the bootloader config and regenerate the bootloader, restart into a snapshot and restore.
I had relied on being able to access grub as per the documentation though and was only a little surprised when it flat out didn’t work. There’s a lot of polish missing all over the place.
Definitely not something that your average user would be able to recover from themselves. There seems to be a gap in testing there, and some questionable decisions that the splash screen can prevent boot.
You asked if anyone had encountered this bug. I use tumbleweed and did encounter it. I would happily see more people using Linux, but for that to happen we need to acknowledge the areas that need improvement, rather than just blithely claiming they are pushing an agenda.
Tumbleweed is incredible, it doesn’t make the tradeoffs with outdated packages that leap has and is usually very stable, but in this case there may be some test cases or processes that might help improve it even further.
When slowroll is more mature I plan on switching to that to hopefully avoid these types of problems.
Funnily enough I had more bugs on Tumbleweed than on Arch. Admittedly, most of them were probably not on Tumbleweed, but it seems like there are just much more people caring about Arch. Otherwise I can’t explain why it gets so much better support
Latest Tumbleweed snapshot has a Mesa bug that causes 50% chance of black screen after login. A few weeks before that Plymouth was broken causing >1 minute boot times. To solve these issues users need to learn how to rollback updates from command line, so it’s certainly not a good replacement for Windows.
I know it’s rolling release distro but you can’t claim “it’s rolling release so bugs are expected and it’s your fault for using it” and “it’s betest and stablest system ever, everyone should use it” at the same time.
The article doesn’t mention or recommend Tumbleweed as far as I can see.
Is this fakenews or is my tumbleweed install at home hardened… any TW users here heard of this?
https://forums.opensuse.org/t/snapshot-start-up-slowdown-18112024/180434
https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233532
https://forums.opensuse.org/t/after-todays-upgrade-tumbleweed-i-can-no-longer-log-in-via-the-wayland-session/180541
https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1234302
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/12253
Not all hardware seems to be affected (at lest in case of second issue). I have a AMD GPU though and I hit both of them.
Well, I have AMD too and I haven’t encounter either of them… so far. Hope it stays that way.
I also have AMD and do updates regularly and didn’t have this issue, but I think the problem is pretty apparent and has been for quite some time. Packman repository should not be used by non-knowledgeable users! I am not exactly sure what that means for daily use, but as seen here it creates issues if you are not aware what an update actually does or just press “yes, yes, yes” to all questions in an update process.
In regards to plymouth I have no clue, but it seems this should be easily manageable by booting into a previous snapshot?
The Plymouth bug resulted in my install failing to boot. Holding the grub shortcut to show the boot menu did not work, so I had to boot from a USB, decrypt the drive, mount the logical volumes, chroot, update the bootloader config and regenerate the bootloader, restart into a snapshot and restore.
I had relied on being able to access grub as per the documentation though and was only a little surprised when it flat out didn’t work. There’s a lot of polish missing all over the place.
Definitely not something that your average user would be able to recover from themselves. There seems to be a gap in testing there, and some questionable decisions that the splash screen can prevent boot.
I didn’t have such an issue in over 7 years of TW usage. Also saying TW is missing polish is quite clearly showing your “agenda”.
You asked if anyone had encountered this bug. I use tumbleweed and did encounter it. I would happily see more people using Linux, but for that to happen we need to acknowledge the areas that need improvement, rather than just blithely claiming they are pushing an agenda.
Tumbleweed is incredible, it doesn’t make the tradeoffs with outdated packages that leap has and is usually very stable, but in this case there may be some test cases or processes that might help improve it even further.
When slowroll is more mature I plan on switching to that to hopefully avoid these types of problems.
Funnily enough I had more bugs on Tumbleweed than on Arch. Admittedly, most of them were probably not on Tumbleweed, but it seems like there are just much more people caring about Arch. Otherwise I can’t explain why it gets so much better support
Intel gfx and no issues