Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
Today, I am cheating by writing/publishing the review of week52 of 2018 and having a look at the last snapshots that were published with versions 2018*. The pace has been quite a bit lower and thus only 5 more snapshots had been published in 2018 that had not yet been covered in earlier reviews: 1213, 1214, 1218, 1219 and 1224. After that, OBS decided to force us on a break and not produce new snapshots.
Anyway, the few things that got published with those 5 snapshots were:
- Mesa 18.3.1 (updated from 18.1.x)
- Qt 5.12.0
- Linux kernel 4.19.8 & 4.19.11
- Mozilla Firefox 64.0
- KDE Applications 18.12.0
- KDE Frameworks 5.53.0
- Switch to LLVM 7
- Perl 5.28.0
Slow speed, but quite some impact. Nice to see so many larger stacks could be updated/submitted/tested/published before the year ended.
But, as you are certainly used to, openSUSE Tumbleweed would not be called stable rolling distribution if there were not many more things already piled up. And stable means we are not publishing snapshots until the openQA tests have passed. So, there are major updates happening in the coming days/weeks:
- Installer redesign: the sidebar is coming back, showing where in the installation workflow one is currently. This is already checked in to Factory and will take a bit of work to get all the needles right for openQA. This is also the main reason for no new snapshots at the moment
- glibc 2.28, Python 3.7, openssl 1.1.1: The staging is still far from ready though, as Python 3.7 is known to be incompatible to Salt. Additionally, some build cycles in Factory make it close to impossible to update python to 3.7.
- Linux kernel 4.20
- tcl 8.6.9, currently breaks sqlite3’s test suite
Can you recommend the best video graphics card for Tumbleweed ?
It seems that Mesa is still built with/depends on LLVM6 even after the switch to LLVM7, is that intended? AFAIK LLVM7 with mesa fixes quite a number of bugs with Wine and DXVK for AMD GPUs and seems to improve performance.
I installed the test 03012019 snapshot. Like the new YAST2 look and the installer.
“Additionally, some build cycles in Factory make it close to impossible to update python to 3.7.”
Could you explain this a little more? I’m not clear why when it’s relatively trivial to compile and install Python 3.7 oneself I keep reading that it’s impossible for Tumbleweed to upgrade to 3.7.
Python in itself is trivial – but there are roughly 2300 packages inside Tumbleweed that depend on python 3.7. As all the code is installed in a versioned directory (e.g. /usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages) obviously, all those need to be rebuilt – and any single one in the chain can make this a bigger pain.
Actually, I saw your message and retriggered Mesa – but forgot to mention it: Thanks for the report!
Making such a recommendation is very difficult, as it depends a lot on what you want to do. For ‘regular office work’ I’m currently recommending integrated intel GPU, NVidia chips for as long as you want to/can use the proprietary driver (be prepared for regular issues around that, as the kernel is a fast moving target) or AMD/ATI cards (which tend to be more and more stable these days/weeks/months)