> So to me, all that sounds is nifty, but not especially impressive. Any devops team could write something to do the same in a couple of hours. If other distros don't have that, it could simply be because they don't need it.
This isn't a complete description of openQA, but an illustrative snapshot. Btw, it looks like Fedora has adopted this tool as well (several years ago, hehe): https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/
And yet there is no one anywhere who claims that Fedora Rawhide is more stable than openSUSE Tumbleweed. This is in part because of a real difference of purpose and outlook; Tumbleweed is somewhat exceptional as a rolling release which explicitly emphasizes stability through automated testing as a value and goal.
> > It is possible that other distros are catching up here
> This is the crux of your position, though, that all these other distros are that much more behind openSUSE. You start your reply with "yes and yes", very confident, but now here in the meat of the discussion you say you don't actually know.
> I'm not trying to be combative or adversarial here, but it really seems like a lot of assumptions are being made.
Sure. I'm not an active contributor to openSUSE or Debian or RHEL, and I'm not currently working on a study of their production pipelines. I'm just trying to give you a clearer picture of some differentiators that I've picked up as a Linux user, developer, and ops professional with the incidental experience I've had with those distros in the past ~20 years.
But I think some of these 'assumptions' are pretty fair, e.g., the distro that created and chiefly maintains openQA has a more mature automated testing infrastructure than a distro that only adopted it a few years ago.
> My days of installing a distro for fun have been over for a long, long time. Now I only really like Alpine, Devuan if I need something chunkier. I appreciate the suggestions and conversation though, thanks!
You don't need to install (or use) openSUSE to play with OBS. Just make a free account on build.opensuse.org and start building packages for any DEB-based, RPM-based, or PKGBUILD-based distro (as well as container images incl. for Docker, AppImage, Snap, and Flatpak). No Alpine/apk support yet, sadly. Idk whether Devuan is supported as a base distro or not, but there are some repositories intended for use with Devuan hosted on build.opensuse.org, e.g.: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:bgstack15
> Well, I never doubted that was possible. I'm just skeptical OpenSuse's testing setup is/has leading/led to a system that is more stable or whatever other supposed advantages it has over say Debian and Red Hat.
The only way you can really compare the stability of two distros is by actually running them. What I can offer you short of that experiential knowledge is that openSUSE has a sophisticated, mature testing infrastructure of which major components have been adopted by the other distros you cite as examples.
You will be hard pressed to find someone who can compare the testing infrastructure of even just two distros in great detail and totally current. This guy probably can, he's a major NixOS/nixpkgs contributor, a Fedora developer, and an Alpine contributor: https://github.com/fabaff . I can't personally think of anyone else, but I'm sure there are some.
I can tell you that still fairly recently, one Debian developer gave a talk about the Open Build Service with the subtitle 'fix the mess': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh0FoS_J_Gs
> Is that cruft not just project preferences, of which each distro has it's own version?
Yes? But preferences can be literally anything with widely varying impacts on social and technical processes... so to say 'everyone has them' doesn't really say anything at all.
Anyway, about the actual package managers I can be much more concrete because I've used them all much more recently.
> So, what makes the openSUSE package manager so much better than apk, apt or xbps?
Like I said, I won't speak to xbps because I've not used it. Additionally, this comes with the caveat that you may prefer package managers that make different tradeoffs than zypper and dnf do. But here are the things that openSUSE's package manager (and nowadays also Fedora's) get really right imo that apk and apt are lagging on.
This means that resolving dependencies in a way that is guaranteed to be both correct and complete requires is hard (indeed, it's NP-hard). Dependency managers that take this seriously employ SAT solvers, openSUSE's now lives in this library: https://github.com/openSUSE/libsolv. apt lagged behind zypper in this area for many, many years, and just finally got a SAT solver for dependency resolution a couple months ago: https://blog.jak-linux.org/2024/05/14/solver3/ . Apk doesn't have a backtracking dependency solver and thus will sometimes fail to identify possible solutions to dependency resolution problems, even when they exist. But for that, it gets to be fast. I believe pacman and xbps also make that same tradeoff (completeness for speed).
Apt has similarly lagged in establishing a modern command-line interface. Zypper provided a modern, unified subcommand interface for managing all packages and repositories when it came out nearly two decades ago, whereas apt has only offered a modern subcommand interface for less than a year ( https://9to5linux.com/ubuntu-24-10-and-debian-13-trixie-to-f... ), and last I used it (within a year or two) it also still lacked facilities for key management (apt-key was deprecated but there is no integrated replacement). APT is making some very nice advances, but they're still playing catch-up.
The single thing I miss the most with APT, though, is entirely missing, and it's the notion of 'vendor'. openSUSE's package manager introduced me to the concept of 'vendor stickiness' (https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Vendor_change_update), which allows you to upgrade without changing who is providing what package for you in a natural way. (This idea has also since been adopted by Fedora in their `dnf` package manager, as well.) Zypper's facilities for creating a hierarchy of repositories, prioritizing them, and marking some equivalent to others with respect to 'vendor', are just way more flexible and powerful than anything available in APT.
> I mean, Debian as a system has a standard for its packages, standardizing what they felt they needed to, and all packages adhere to that and the system has been working well
From a packager's perspective, the tooling situation for openSUSE is also way more uniform than for Debian or downstream distros, which can make it easier to get your head around. Even a small amount of packaging experience for Debian is enough to reveal a marked enough difference here to justify a preference for some other distro.
> possibly longer than suse has even existed.
Debian is something like 6 months older than SUSE. SUSE, like Debian, is one of the oldest surviving Linux distributions.
This isn't a complete description of openQA, but an illustrative snapshot. Btw, it looks like Fedora has adopted this tool as well (several years ago, hehe): https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/
And yet there is no one anywhere who claims that Fedora Rawhide is more stable than openSUSE Tumbleweed. This is in part because of a real difference of purpose and outlook; Tumbleweed is somewhat exceptional as a rolling release which explicitly emphasizes stability through automated testing as a value and goal.
> > It is possible that other distros are catching up here
> This is the crux of your position, though, that all these other distros are that much more behind openSUSE. You start your reply with "yes and yes", very confident, but now here in the meat of the discussion you say you don't actually know.
> I'm not trying to be combative or adversarial here, but it really seems like a lot of assumptions are being made.
Sure. I'm not an active contributor to openSUSE or Debian or RHEL, and I'm not currently working on a study of their production pipelines. I'm just trying to give you a clearer picture of some differentiators that I've picked up as a Linux user, developer, and ops professional with the incidental experience I've had with those distros in the past ~20 years.
But I think some of these 'assumptions' are pretty fair, e.g., the distro that created and chiefly maintains openQA has a more mature automated testing infrastructure than a distro that only adopted it a few years ago.
> My days of installing a distro for fun have been over for a long, long time. Now I only really like Alpine, Devuan if I need something chunkier. I appreciate the suggestions and conversation though, thanks!
You don't need to install (or use) openSUSE to play with OBS. Just make a free account on build.opensuse.org and start building packages for any DEB-based, RPM-based, or PKGBUILD-based distro (as well as container images incl. for Docker, AppImage, Snap, and Flatpak). No Alpine/apk support yet, sadly. Idk whether Devuan is supported as a base distro or not, but there are some repositories intended for use with Devuan hosted on build.opensuse.org, e.g.: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:bgstack15
> Well, I never doubted that was possible. I'm just skeptical OpenSuse's testing setup is/has leading/led to a system that is more stable or whatever other supposed advantages it has over say Debian and Red Hat.
The only way you can really compare the stability of two distros is by actually running them. What I can offer you short of that experiential knowledge is that openSUSE has a sophisticated, mature testing infrastructure of which major components have been adopted by the other distros you cite as examples.
You will be hard pressed to find someone who can compare the testing infrastructure of even just two distros in great detail and totally current. This guy probably can, he's a major NixOS/nixpkgs contributor, a Fedora developer, and an Alpine contributor: https://github.com/fabaff . I can't personally think of anyone else, but I'm sure there are some.
I can tell you that still fairly recently, one Debian developer gave a talk about the Open Build Service with the subtitle 'fix the mess': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh0FoS_J_Gs
> Is that cruft not just project preferences, of which each distro has it's own version?
Yes? But preferences can be literally anything with widely varying impacts on social and technical processes... so to say 'everyone has them' doesn't really say anything at all.
Anyway, about the actual package managers I can be much more concrete because I've used them all much more recently.
> So, what makes the openSUSE package manager so much better than apk, apt or xbps?
Like I said, I won't speak to xbps because I've not used it. Additionally, this comes with the caveat that you may prefer package managers that make different tradeoffs than zypper and dnf do. But here are the things that openSUSE's package manager (and nowadays also Fedora's) get really right imo that apk and apt are lagging on.
This means that resolving dependencies in a way that is guaranteed to be both correct and complete requires is hard (indeed, it's NP-hard). Dependency managers that take this seriously employ SAT solvers, openSUSE's now lives in this library: https://github.com/openSUSE/libsolv. apt lagged behind zypper in this area for many, many years, and just finally got a SAT solver for dependency resolution a couple months ago: https://blog.jak-linux.org/2024/05/14/solver3/ . Apk doesn't have a backtracking dependency solver and thus will sometimes fail to identify possible solutions to dependency resolution problems, even when they exist. But for that, it gets to be fast. I believe pacman and xbps also make that same tradeoff (completeness for speed).
Apt has similarly lagged in establishing a modern command-line interface. Zypper provided a modern, unified subcommand interface for managing all packages and repositories when it came out nearly two decades ago, whereas apt has only offered a modern subcommand interface for less than a year ( https://9to5linux.com/ubuntu-24-10-and-debian-13-trixie-to-f... ), and last I used it (within a year or two) it also still lacked facilities for key management (apt-key was deprecated but there is no integrated replacement). APT is making some very nice advances, but they're still playing catch-up.
The single thing I miss the most with APT, though, is entirely missing, and it's the notion of 'vendor'. openSUSE's package manager introduced me to the concept of 'vendor stickiness' (https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Vendor_change_update), which allows you to upgrade without changing who is providing what package for you in a natural way. (This idea has also since been adopted by Fedora in their `dnf` package manager, as well.) Zypper's facilities for creating a hierarchy of repositories, prioritizing them, and marking some equivalent to others with respect to 'vendor', are just way more flexible and powerful than anything available in APT.
> I mean, Debian as a system has a standard for its packages, standardizing what they felt they needed to, and all packages adhere to that and the system has been working well
From a packager's perspective, the tooling situation for openSUSE is also way more uniform than for Debian or downstream distros, which can make it easier to get your head around. Even a small amount of packaging experience for Debian is enough to reveal a marked enough difference here to justify a preference for some other distro.
> possibly longer than suse has even existed.
Debian is something like 6 months older than SUSE. SUSE, like Debian, is one of the oldest surviving Linux distributions.