Starting with snapshot 20220204 I recorded every Tumbleweed upgrade on my daily driver. Over the course of more than a year, I recorded 200 successful upgrades, encountered 6 regressions, did 0 rollbacks and skipped 5 times a snapshot upgrade. Long story short: Tumbleweed is probably more stable than you give it credit for.

This story starts where most engineering stories start. Someone was annoyed by something. In this case the motivation came from some recent frustration about the “constant breakages in Tumbleweed” and the typical attached prejudgements.

So I decided to put those prejudgements to the test. Starting with Snapshot 20220204 I logged every TW upgrade process over more than a year.

Snapshot upgrades are counted as successful, when I don’t experience any operational issues. Minor things that can be solved within 5 minutes of looking at the Mailinglist/Reddit/Google do also count as success in my calculation, as this is just part of being in a rolling release. Everything else counts as regression or as skipped, in the case of installation issues e.g. package conflicts. Skipped means basically, I decided to not install this snapshot due to package conflicts or similar.

Today I upgraded from 20230221 to 20230222 and this marks the 200th successful upgrade. Over those 200 upgrades I encountered 6 regressions, I skipped 5 times a snapshot upgrade and I had to rollback my system 0 times.

So, at least according to my records, the “constant breakages in Tumbleweed” prejudgement is unjustified and Tumbleweed is a fairly stable daily driver, once you learn how to handle it.

And here’s the full history of my Tumbleweed daily driver: Updates.txt.

Actually it’s 201. When recounting I realized that there were 201 successful upgrades. I’ve been counting them by hand, so apparently I was missing one when I did the log this morning 😀 I’m not gonna update the previous post though, to not spoil the party. That’s one for free for you then 😉