Used openSUSE Tumbleweed KDE 64Bit For 1+ Years - Not Happy - Will Manjaro Fix That?

Non-technical Questions
#1

Hi,

Ran openSUSE Tumbleweed KDE 64Bit for over a year…
(it’s a “Rolling Release” like Manjaro)

For the most part it’s been great, but recently my OS has been showing severe issues,
and the openSUSE forums people are not very helpful.

I looked at Manjaro a few years ago and it was a mess…
I’m taking another look at Manjaro now in a VirtualBox Virtual Machine.

I need an install once/update forever Linux OS that is stable.
The issue I have now with openSUSE Tumbleweed KDE 64Bit is:
Every night when I am sleeping the computer’s RAM fills up and I wake to a crashed desktop?
(frozen and hard reset is necessary)

I don’t know if that is a problem with openSUSE or KDE, perhaps someone can comment?

I’ll play around with Manjaro KDE and xfce in a VM for a day or two and then will make a decision.
Can someone respond to my forum post with some advice?

Thanks!

Jesse

#2

Welcome to the forum! :slight_smile:

I cannot say why your openSUSE installation is crashing, but Tumbleweed is considered very bleeding edge ─ it is the unstable/testing branch of openSUSE. By comparison, Manjaro Stable is a curated rolling release, which means that updates are thoroughly tested and bundled together.

I myself have been running Manjaro Stable on this machine for almost two years now, and although there have been a few bugs ─ often upstream bugs ─ I cannot say that I’ve ever run into anything so dramatic as what you’re describing. But then again, I’m also not a rookie; I’ve been exclusively running GNU/Linux on my own computers for well over 20 years now, so I know what I’m doing.

That said, have you considered the possibility that there might be a hardware flaw involved? And if you’re running the proprietary Nvidia driver, then there’s no telling what may happen, because that driver is closed-source and it runs in the kernel’s address space ─ which means that it has full access to the hardware and to anything else the kernel takes care of.

Just my two Eurocents, for whatever they’re worth. :slight_smile:

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#3

This is rare to happen on any distro. If you switch to Manjaro (or even reinstall Tumbleweed) you are unlikely to run into this issue again.

Manjaro stable is quite stable, if you take good care of it:

  • don’t push back updates too much or let them accumulate. This could lead to updates that require manual intervention.
  • if you want to play it really safe, read the update announcements before updating. There is an app call mntray for this if you want to keep it simple.
  • don’t use AUR unless you know what you doing and keep the number of AUR packages to minimum.
  • keep at least two kernels installed
  • if you use btrfs, install timeshift-autosnap and grub-btrfs so you can easily rollback any changes you don’t like until you find a solution.
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