Why create spiral instead of using openSUSE?

[FitzM]

I've been curious why you created Sprial after having Gecko linux. Personally, I'm torn between the two ( I configured MX Linux to work similar to Spiral) and was curious about your thought process since you clearly used both.

Any big downsides between one or the other? Or to phrase it another way , any huge advantages between them?

Yast is being depreciated for cockpit , and with snapper configured correctly I'm hard pressed to see much of a difference between the two outside of package versions.

[geckolinux]

Hi there, how's it going?

So what really pushed me toward Debian was when SUSE and openSUSE first announced their new development direction with "ALP". The openSUSE project has always struggled with clearly communicating their decisions, but initially they indicated that Leap as we know it was going away, and that the only base for a future enterprise openSUSE branch would be the SUSE "ALP" codebase, complete with all the latest enterprise buzzwords such as container workloads and immutability with atomic updates. None of those "features" interest me, and it was looking as if there would no longer be a stable / fixed-release branch of openSUSE in the not-so-distant future. Later they backtracked, and to make a long story short there is currently a new major release of Leap coming out, and so far it appears to be a traditional mutable Linux system. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like there is indeed less availability of packages for desktop environments and desktop functionality in general, and openSUSE has done nothing to assure the community that mid-term to long-term Leap will continue to be a viable option for general desktop computing. And the loss of YaST in Leap as well as its imminent deprecation in Tumbleweed makes the openSUSE ecosystem considerably less attractive for both server and desktop scenarios (I have extensively test Cockpit, and it is not even close to providing all the necessary components for GUI administration).

I still like Tumbleweed for situations where a rolling system is desired or required, but more often than not, I and other users I support are better served by a non-rolling system. At present, openSUSE is sort of still offering that in the form of Leap, but if we define "stability" as "being predictable" and "not changing", openSUSE has already failed at that since the communication chaos revolving around Leap's development shift. There is simply no guarantee that a server or a desktop machine intended for long-term use will be continue to have a viable option from openSUSE, especially if they or SUSE make more erratic decisions in the future. So that strongly pushes me toward the stability (i.e. "predictability") of Debian for those use cases. For better or for worse, Debian is usually highly predictable, and it's pretty likely that Debian 14 and 15 will work more or less like the current Debian 12.

I'm still playing around with updating the GeckoLinux Rolling spins, but the Static branch is definitely off the table, and I would recommend SpiralLinux for scenarios where Static would have previously been recommended.

[FitzM]

I actually have the same view with nearly all of what you said. I feel like they have " lost their way " and I'm not sure what is down the road , there is a new naming convention of some sort that is undetermined, yast got parallel downloads out of nowhere , and yast being depreciated is huge and unexpected. The first thing I always hear about the perks of OpenSUSE is yast. I agree that cockpit isn't sufficient to replace it and I'm quite surprised the option wasn't to update or rewrite yast instead of just letting it die.

Thanks for your response, I look forward to seeing the direction of your projects.

[FitzM]

I actually have the same view with nearly all of what you said. I feel like they have " lost their way " and I'm not sure what is down the road , there is a new naming convention of some sort that is undetermined, yast got parallel downloads out of nowhere , and yast being depreciated is huge and unexpected. The first thing I always hear about the perks of OpenSUSE is yast. I agree that cockpit isn't sufficient to replace it and I'm quite surprised the option wasn't to update or rewrite yast instead of just letting it die.

Thanks for your response, I look forward to seeing the direction of your projects.

( posted here too because apparently I don't know how to reply correctly)

[himanshukorpal]

Is spiral linux active last update was like 2023m

[geckolinux]

@himanshukorpal No updates to SpiralLinux are required, as the current SpiralLinux configuration on the ISOs is free of major bugs, and after installation the system will receive updates directly from Debian Stable, which is still at version 12.

[himanshukorpal]

If i change to current or like rolling on latest debian..is it ok?

[geckolinux]

https://github.com/SpiralLinux/SpiralLinux-project/wiki#switching-from-debian-stable-to-the-testing-or-unstable-branch