this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I like TW a lot but it's not what I would recommend to newbies. The patterns system is dumb and constantly installs needless crap by default if you don't know how to deal with it. Last I've checked (disclaimer: it's been a while) the PackageKit-Zypper back-end was severely broken and there were no attempts to fix it because everyone uses zypper CLI anyway. If you are a somewhat experienced user, dealing with the quirks is not much of an issue and the long term benefits of getting an extremely robust rolling release distribution far outweigh the downsides but for newbies something like Fedora is a much better choice.
Just a quick note, I generally use the packagekit backend (via Plasma Discover) and it works fine the vast majority of the time (including taking snapshots).
The only time I've seen problems with it is when user intervention is required, e.g. if there's some conflict on upgrade. Discover, at least, seems to silently fail, at which point I hit the terminal and do
sudo zypper dup.I'm not sure if Yast works better, as I prefer Discover since it integrates (mostly) seamlessly with Plasma, and using the CLI doesn't bother me. I could see it being an issue for somebody who wants things to "just work" and/or is not well-versed in Linux. So, I agree that it may not be ideal for newbies; just wanted to give some info on the current packagekit status.
The issue that bit me most often was that I usually do my package management from command line but when the updater checked for updates in the background zypper printed a message along the line of "PackageKit is blocking the database. Want to ask PackageKit to quit doing that?" and Yes just did nothing. At some point I just made a Google Doc with a set of commands after a fresh installation (because a proper script is too professional😁) and removing anything PackageKit is among those commands.
Better as in directly doing package management on its own: yes. Better in terms of usability: no. I use Yast to remove those stupid patterns because doing that with zypper removes all software in that pattern as well.