Years ago, I was at (Linuxfest Northwest)[https://lfnw.org] and picked up a OpenSUSE DVD just out of interest. I remember a few hours later in the hotel room with a buddy that I was sharing a flat with that we installed it and then proceeded to try to understand why we couldn't get the networking to work. At the time, and I was probably just being daft, not much of YaST made any sense to me. I'd heard of the power of YaST and the quality of OpenSUSE in general so I was sure I could figure it out. After a couple of hours, I declared it all silly and abandoned ship.

Tumbleweed is OpenSUSE's rolling release that offers fresher packages on almost a daily scheule. The reviews warn that from time to time, upgrades will be held back as dependencies in one package can't be met yet as the dependent package hasn't been updated yet. All the reviews offered that this was both infrequent and when it did occur the delay was at most a couple of days. Your not left with a broken install (looking at you all Arch) but rather some packages that are slightly out of date. A rolling release can sound scary for those coming from other distrobutions, but it seems like the community takes a softer approach than others.

So back to the installation story... Fast forward to just two weeks ago and a rash decision to install it while on vacation. Now installing a new Linux distro while on vacation already shows that I'm making poor choices but this all worked out. Eventhough I was on the Northern edge of the Scottish coast, I was fortunate enough to have a robust Internet connection that allowed me to pull down the .iso. I had a USB hard drive along, as one does on a vacation, with Ventoy installed and proceeded to install from drive once the .iso was copied over.

The install process was clear, but I still missed click on the LUKS encryption configuration. After a reinstall (I always LUKS encrypt to at least put up some barrier to the data if the machine is stolen) I was staring at my preferred KDE 6.3 desktop. Updates are always needed so I had a choice, I could fire up KDE Discover and install all the updates, or I could try updates from the terminal. Terminal of course! After a 'sudo zypper dup' I was completely up to date with a snapshot release that was published not more than 12 hours before that time. I did the recommended reboot and was back at the desktop within minutes.

Now, on to installing software. With KDE Discover about, installing anything else was easy. As Flatpaks are available, and KDE Discover let's me choose between OpenSUSE packages and Flatpaks. After loading a mix of both I had all of my applications up and running as I would on any other distro.

In the days after, Tumbleweed has been this drama free, updated install that I'm still having fun poking around in places. I'm watching the forums and IRC for the general buzz of the distro and finding a helpful community that seems to be quite active.

For now that's the install and use, more in a few weeks when I've used in more on a day to day basis...