Clarifying Misunderstandings of Slowroll

Results from a use case survey gave some insightful information about how people perceive openSUSE Slowroll.

Some view it as a replacement for openSUSE Leap, but recent news about a clear course set for Leap should help to explain that Slowroll has a different path.

Slowroll is an experimental distribution introduced in 2023. It was designed as a variant of openSUSE Tumbleweed when the future of openSUSE Leap was not yet clear.

The main characteristic of this distribution is a slower rolling release compared to Tumbleweed.

Some users might find value in this balance between rapid updates of Tumbleweed and a traditional stable release like openSUSE Leap. After all, the purpose and principles of open-source software is to promote software freedom, enable users to freely study, modify, and distribute software for any purpose; Slowroll is doing all of the above.

Slowroll integrates big updates every one month or so along with continuous bug fixes and security updates as they are available.

The idea behind Slowroll is to offer a distribution that improves stability without losing access to new features in the base packages such as the kernel, desktop environments and packaging. These slower update cycles allow for more extensive testing and validation of packages before their inclusion. Think of Slowroll as more of a skip than a Leap.

Regarding Slowrolls relationship with openSUSE Leap, it’s important to note that Slowroll is not a replacement for Leap. Rather, it provides an alternative for users seeking more up-to-date software at a slower pace than Tumbleweed, but much faster than Leap. This is particularly relevant in the context of the future branch of the SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution transitioning to ALP (Adaptive Linux Platform). The development of Slowroll originated from discussions among openSUSE developers about the future of the openSUSE Leap distribution, but has no other relation to the Leap release.

Slowroll is still rather new and is based on openSUSE Tumbleweed packages.

While Slowroll is a significant addition to the openSUSE family, it caters to users choosing a slightly slower up-to-date software system. The name Slowroll was chosen to reflect its slower update cycle and has been retained after a community voting process​.