I am continually impressed by the tolerance that openSUSE Tumbleweed has to delays between updates. The recommendation is weekly, maybe bi-weekly to keep your system up to day. It is NOT a good idea to go much more than a month but I have been sloppy from time to time. The great thing about Tumbleweed is that it will tolerate you not updating your system for eighteen months.
I have a AcerOne netbook from 2010 that was shelved for a while and pulled out only recently because it was needed to write a paper while another computer was suffering the death of an SSD and waiting for a replacement to arrive.
The last time I updated this computer was 13 Feb 2022, I was confident but not quite 100% confident that this would be successful and after quite some time, all the packages downloaded and installed without any issue. I was incredibly impressed that this worked as well as it did.
Will I be using this painfully slow machine much? No, but from time to time, it is nice to bust it out, do an update and see what happens. It can still play some older open source games well and works great for GCompris or doing a little retro gaming. This machine was painfully slow when I got it a decade ago, it is no better today.
Final Thoughts
I really need to swap out the spinning-rust hard disk drive and put an SSD in this but I don’t know that I would really benefit much from that speed increase. If only this machine had a bit more horsepower, I love the small form factor and the screen really is of good quality. I really enjoy how small an portable this thing is. I still think the Netbook era was one of the best times of manufacturer experimentation.
As far as my choice of openSUSE on this gem, I wouldn’t change it. I am using Plasma as I get about the same performance out of LXQt and XFCE. I am glad that this 64bit netbook can take and run… well… jog well with a modern operating system and the desktop environment of my choice.
References
Acer AspireOne D255 with openSUSE Tumbleweed Xfce
Get openSUSE
One thought on “openSUSE Tumbleweed Endures 18 Month Update Gap”