u/bmwiedemann

Edit 2026-10-10 04:00 UTC: Packman is done building, https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/openSUSE:Slowroll:Build:2 has the first round of updates building and it will auto-publish when done as usual.

Edit: 18:55 UTC: main update is done. Packman still need some time for rebuilding, so if you use it and get conflicts, wait some more. Next comes the first round of updates.

Edit 17:58 UTC: There were some technical difficulties and I enabled publishing of the repo too early, so it will have inconsistent versions. Should be resolved within an hour or so.

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This time we move the base TW snapshot from 20260901 to 20261001 while Tumbleweed already moved another 6 days.

openQA shows tests passing decently, though UEFI is red there. And the default KDE selection still is not there. need to debug it later...

I'll edit this post when the update is done.

Hi,

several years ago, the openSUSE project decided (per member vote) to no more select a default desktop in the YaST installer.

However, I feel this would be a hindrance to adoption by new users, that now have to deliberate and decide there. So I propose to make KDE the default selection in Slowroll as it seems to be the more popular choice among existing users, that makes it more likely to be good for new users as well.

For anyone who knows that they want a GNOME/XFCE/icewm/server install, it is just one click away in the same place it always was. Same number of clicks as before. You just need to be attentive enough to not click "Next" there.

I'm deliberately not posting this on r/openSUSE or on the factory ML, because I think, this decision belongs to us - the Slowroll users.

What do you think?

Edit 16:00 UTC: main update is done. First round of updates should come soonish.

It is time again for the monthly update of major versions.

This time we move the base TW snapshot from 20260802 to 20260901 while Tumbleweed already moved another 6 days.

https://openqa.opensuse.org/tests/overview?distri=opensuse&version=Slowroll&build=69.2&groupid=131 shows tests passing decently, though UEFI is red there.

At the end of the cycle, we had 13 packages that could not be built because of Qt version dependency problems.

The slowroll-tools got some improvements for updating interdependent packages by ClaudeAI and resilience to download server outages by a local LLM (gemma-4 4B).

I'll edit this post when the update is done.

During the past weeks I have been experimenting with the use of AI (LLM coding agents, mostly Claude) for different projects.

I know there is some negative sentiment towards AI. The most extreme one I encountered so far is https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/ .

One concern is that AIs can produce slop (low quality outputs) when used in a careless way. They can create bogus findings and useless patches. But there are also powerful AIs that debug hard problems in hours that we have not found the capacity to investigate for years. And with extra review + refinement runs the results are pretty nice.

Another real concern is that the growing adoption of AI fuels climate-change, causes massive unemployment and could sooner or later create an artificial super-intelligence that might end humanity. However, similar to the old problem of climate change, I'm only 1/8000000000th of us and my individual decisions have little influence on the outcome.

On the pro side, we could finally make progress on the slowroll-tools to get this distribution out of beta status.

The goal is to still be able to understand and debug all the code myself (which was not the case for a golang part contributed by someone), so there will be AI code-generation, but no vibe-coding.

What do you think?

As every month, I started the monthly update to sync major version updates from Factory(TW). We will be on the 20260802 snapshot for the next month.

Factory had a major rebuild of 50% of it's `x86_64` packages for the gcc16 update and this will make it one of the larger updates. Expect some GB of downloads.

I'll edit this post later, when the update is done.

Edit2: worth noting again that the base snapshot had >50% of packages rebuilt (e.g. to drop python311 modules), so expect a larger zypper dup than usual.

Edit: as of 17:55 the main update is done and even Packman rebuilt the x86_64 parts. i586 still ongoing.

original message was I started the process to change the base Tumbleweed snapshot from 20260601 to 20260707.

As usual, I'll edit this post when it is done.

One small mishap already happened in that I accidentally deleted the magic "freezelink" file in openSUSE:Slowroll:Base:1 so projects such as Packman that link Slowroll sources to rebuild them, will point to the 20260709 versions now. I'll monitor if this causes extra breakage and compensate.

Tumbleweed snapshot 20260703 brings a lot of rebuilt packages as explained in https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/factory@lists.opensuse.org/thread/33YD224AVWDOBXG5UJWDZ6X6ZTCBWZ7N/

This makes me re-plan the July Slowroll update, where I planned to use 20260702 as a base. That would cause a larger diff right from the start.

I'll try to use 20260706 for Slowroll (if it passes openQA) and publish it this Friday.