A stable and well-tested rolling release
Rollin' rollin' rollin'
We talked with Richard Brown at SUSECon about openSUSE Tumbleweed and the rolling release process.
There are two types of users: 1) Those who want a very stable, rock solid environment where they can run their applications without worrying about breaking things; and 2) Those who want the latest technologies to play with. openSUSE is now targeting both use cases with rock solid Leap and rolling release Tumbleweed. At SUSECon, I sat down with Richard Brown, who has played an instrumental role in openSUSE Tumbleweed. Brown chairs the openSUSE Board and recently joined SUSE (Figure 1).
The Brief History of Tumbleweed
The name Tumbleweed has been around for a very long time; kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman started the project back in 2010. Kroah-Hartman called it "a repo that is a rolling updated version of openSUSE, containing the latest 'stable' versions of packages for people to use." It wasn't a rolling release distribution in the true sense; in essence, it was actually rolling updates on top of the stable releases of openSUSE.
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