As a new linux user (1 year), seeing all the distros out there is very overwhelming and it's hard to grasp the true nature of a distro based only on short term reviews that miss a lot of the important details. So what better thing than to ask it's users the reasons behind them using it.
Write everything that comes to mind for why you chose, use and recommend openSUSE. What makes it special? And what things do you dislike?
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Hello guys, i am thinking about switching to Suse but i am wonderin what can suse give me that fedora cant. I have heard yast is a great tool, Suse is better with kernel modules (oracle virtualbox) and Tumbleweed is not that bleeding edge as Fedora (thats a good point for me).
I am using my system dual booted with Win 11 for a few reasons and installer of OpenSuse seems a lil confusing.
I have a decent modern laptop with a i5 1135G7 and no dedicated GPU, i am worried about wifi and sound drivers too. For the ones who could check my laptop is Acer A315 58 516F. Only driver issue i experienced is with debian for my sound drivers.
Let me preface this by saying I am very much new to openSUSE and it's community. I thought I might offer some insight as an outsider, and try to get some feedback to understand the direction of the project as a whole. I'm a Linux user of about 17 years. I have been running Linux full time on my personal hardware for about half that, aside from the occasional Windows game / application which runs in a VM with GPU pass-through these days.
I'm not strictly against proprietary software, but support / promote open-source and free (as in speech) software/solutions as much as I can to my clients, friends, family, etc. In my opinion things like proprietary codecs, video drivers, and other software are a necessary evil with the current state of Linux. To me, being able to own your data and the tools to easily manage it takes priority over being able to modify those tools. Of course there's something to be said for security and piece of mind when using free (as in speech) tools in your workflow.
The position I constantly find myself in is the distribution and software choices I make as an advanced user, is not something I feel I can recommend to those that seek advice from me most of time. I've been running Arch on the desktop almost exclusively for the last 5 years. However, I find myself recommending Ubuntu or Pop!_OS for most newcomers, but spend very little time dealing with these distributions first hand. I am, 99% of the time, working with Arch, CentOS, and RHEL.
So this leaves me in a position, where I know very little about the solutions I'm recommending. When these people who look up to me, inevitably have problems, I often find myself wasting a lot of time researching the quirks of these particular platforms. I had a friend upset with me over this last month. She asked me if I'm not willing to use it myself, then why did I ever recommend it to her? I couldn't come up with a good answer for that, and it is really starting to bother me.
With Red Hat killing off CentOS, and what I believe to be a loss of community focus with the IBM acquisition, I've found myself seeking other options. I know many are moving to community driven projects like AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. However, I can't help but feel a little jaded about the position Red Hat has put me in by cutting 9 years off the lifespan of the thousands of CentOS deployments I'm responsible for, seemingly overnight. I'm not sure I can, in good faith, stay within the Red Hat ecosystem.
This has led me to openSUSE and SLE. I greatly appreciate the efforts SUSE has made in this space. Bringing the Leap code base so close to SLE. SUSE is actually giving back to the community in exchange for the upstream community contributions. Red Hat seems to be taking advantage of the community in the form of CentOS Stream, but It's a one-way street, with the stable product behind a pay-wall.
Please understand, I'm not trying to bash the openSUSE project with what I'm about to say. Overall, I love openSUSE and see great potential, I'm just not exactly sure where all of this leaves me in my search for a new home. I'm hoping we can have a productive conversation around this. I'm open to any and all feedback / recommendations. I'm very interested to see where others fall on this topic.
I love the fact that I have found a family of products I'm willing to use on my own hardware (Tumbleweed), and on the server (Leap and SLE). But there is still one thing nagging at me. I can't bring myself to recommend it for novice users. In my view there seems to be little polish out of the box, especially as a GNOME user who finds vanilla GNOME to be practically unusable. My understanding is KDE's the flagship desktop, but even then, I feel lacks a lot of polish. The direction of the project seems to be focused on the server, with little attention given to the desktop.
As a power user I've found so many things with stock openSUSE that annoy the hell out of me. Most of these things can be solved fairly easily, but man does it wear on me. The installer, while powerful, is slowest and clunkiest process I've ever seen in a modern distribution. High DPI is flat out broken on the installer and welcome app. Application availability is kind of a problem. I've been able to work around this mostly with OBS, but not everything is there, and using a website to pull down apps seems like a step backwards. OPI works well, but man is it slow compared to other tools like yay on Arch. I find Zypper to be slow, although a tuned DNF gets me to a comfortable spot. There's just such a long list I don't want to get into right now.
To summarize I think openSUSE is a fantastic distribution for those who know what they want, and how to make it work. I just find myself in a position where, because of what I view as shortcomings of the distribution, I can't recommend it to everyone. From my limited time in the openSUSE forums and reddit, the desktop user experience doesn't seem to be a real focus of the project.
Hi guys so what's your opinion? Why is such a solid distro so overlooked?
I have switched from endeavouros 2 years ago and I am absolutely in love with opensuse tumbleweed.
Rolling, stable, bleeding edge, yast, works like a charm, opi, lots of tools and perks, amazing KDE implementation, works for both personal and private use as well.
But somehow opensuse doesn't get the attention it should. Why is that?
Im a sysadmin who has been using OpenSUSE for about 2 years now. I love it. All of my personal workstations and servers are running it.
But the whole reason I picked it initially was because I really like BTRFS and their website says it’s great for Sysadmin.
It’s the only workstation distro I’ve ever used so I guess I I’ve been thinking about trying a new distro but I’m honestly failing to see why I would when OpenSUSE offers so much customization.
What makes OpenSUSE so Sysadmin friendly? Why would someone choose something other than OpenSUSE? Surely there must be a reason, right?
Hello guys, I'm planning to try a rolling release and I'm thinking about trying Opensuse. Currently using Linux MX.
What are the main differences between Suse and a debian based?
What things some people new to suse may not like?
Any other tip or info is also appreciated, thanks.
I have distro-hopped a lot and have used the following distros as my daily driver for at least a month: Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Fedora, Silverblue, Bluefin, Debian, Pop!_OS, and LMDE. I still think openSUSE Tumbleweed is the winner. It's stable, modern, doesn't crash on updates, and has good tools. When I see polls, I'm surprised to see so few people use it. Additionally, the openSUSE subreddit is smaller than most other distro subreddits.
I must admit, the openSUSE branding does look a bit dated. Could that be the reason?
I was a user using ubuntu-based distros but i learnt about opensuse 5 years ago. I decided to check it out and got attracted by tumbleweed. Continued to use kubuntu until the whole snap debacle a few months ago and also got annoyed by sometimes it wouldn't even load. Decided to try many distros. None, not even fedora (I have it on a seperate partition), appealed to me. I decided to try opensuse tumbleweed and haven't looked back.
I like how it is stable yet current.
What brought you to opensuse?
Oh, its easy. When I did distro-hopping I was trying to find distro which just works with less issues for all of my needs. OpenSUSE was the only distro that:
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did not have tearing issue oob
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handled Bluetooth headphones correctly
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KDE was noticeable faster and stable (tumbleweed)
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Handled multi-monitor usage good enough
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as a bonus: snapper, yast, firewall etc. oob
Yes, I know if it's working in one distro, you can make it work in another, but it was too much hassle for me. This post does not mean openSUSE is perfect, I surely had some issues. But definitely not more than in any other distro.
Long time Slackware user and early last year I wanted to get a new PC, but the newest Slackware stable version was about five years old at the time. I spent a few months testing out a bunch of distros in a VM to see which one felt the most comfortable and I eventually narrowed it down to Fedora and openSUSE.
I was leaning towards picking Fedora until I made a mistake in my openSUSE VM that caused it to boot to a black screen. I tried a few things and just figured I would reinstall, but when I rebooted I noticed an option in the Grub menu to boot into a snapshot (at the time I didn't realize it had that functionality). I chose a snapshot and it booted into the GUI like there had never been an issue. It was the fact that it was so easy for a clueless user (me) to get back to a working system, so the btrfs/zypper/snapper/grub integration was the deciding factor for me.
I use Linux Mint. I would like to switch to OpenSuse (Leap or Tumbleweed), but I read that SUSE has officially asked openSUSE to stop using its name as a brand for the distribution, so OpenSuse will change its name and maybe it will not even be supported by Suse anymore. IMPORTANT: I am worried about having to install OpenSuse and then in 1 or 2 years have to uninstall it because it might not be possible to upgrade to the next version. We don't know if the operating system will undergo major changes when OpenSuse changes its name, so is there a risk that it might not be possible to upgrade to the next new version (the one with the new name)? I would not like to install OpenSuse now and then in 1 or 2 years have to install the new operating system.
What will be the future of OpenSuse?
If I install OpenSuse and after 1 or 2 years the new distribution without the name Suse comes out which will also be very different eventually, then I will not be able to switch to the new version because it would practically be a new different distribution? I am worried about having to install OpenSuse and then in 1 or 2 years have to uninstall it because it might not be possible to upgrade to the next version. We don't know if the operating system will undergo major changes when OpenSuse changes its name, so is there a risk that it might not be possible to upgrade to the next new version (the one with the new name)? I would not like to install OpenSuse now and then in 1 or 2 years have to install the new operating system.
Should I install it now or should I wait?
Will OpenSuse (or whatever it will be called in the future) still be supported by Suse?z
I get why people install arch, debian, fedora, centos, ubuntu, gentoo, etc. I understand their philosophies and the type of distro they are, cutting edge / stable AF, etc. I can't figure out why someone would want to use openSUSE. I'm not trying to stir the pot. I'm legitamitly wanting to know what openSUSE is about, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and a meme level comment is ok if you are actually giving me useful info also.
I don't see it recommended on reddit very often and I just want to understand why. Is it because reddit is more USA-centric and it's a German company?
With Tumbleweed and Leap, there's options for those who prefer more bleeding edge vs more stability. Plus there's excellent integration for both KDE and GNOME.
For what it's worth I've only used Tumbleweed KDE since switching to Linux about six months ago and have only needed to use terminal twice. Before that I was a windows user for my whole life.
This is going to be my first time using Linux for daily use. I don't use my laptop for much—mostly watching movies, TV shows, and some YouTube. For software, I mainly use Word and Excel, and I don’t really do any photo or video editing.
One thing I really enjoy is customizing my desktop to make it look cool.
About a year ago, I installed Fedora on my old laptop before selling it. I didn’t use it much back then—just installed a couple of programs and used it mainly for downloading TV shows, movies, and anime.
So, would it be a good idea to start using openSUSE now?