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?
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.
Videos
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?
My job has been running a series of Linux Distro Reviews. I don't get paid for views, so I don't believe this goes against any guidelines to post a link here.
We recently reviewed openSUSE Tumbleweed, based on my using it for months on multiple machines. The review covers the things I like, don't like, think could be improved, and a rating based on the three target audiences mentioned on the openSUSE website.
https://www.webpronews.com/linux-distro-reviews-opensuse-tumbleweed-part-1/?swcfpc=1
Spoiler Alert: Given how much I'm being downvoted for this post, I thought I'd say upfront that i did rate Tumbleweed 4, 4.5, and 5 stars, depending on the use case. I did have some criticism of issues I experienced, and that I've seen others experience...but I do like the distro and gave it some of the highest ratings of any distro review I've done. 😁
I've never used openSUSE before, but I am pretty familiar with Ubuntu (& derivatives) and Arch. I asked some people on the Linux Gaming subreddit for a recommendation on my next distro.
I told them basically, I don't want stuff atrociously out of date (so not stuff like Debian Stable), but I also don't want stuff breaking at random like Arch. Even Kubuntu I have issues with once in a while, such as right now, as far as I'm aware, I can't turn off mouse acceleration because they moved to libinput from xinput. (That's a minor issue, just mentioned cause it's the most recent one.)
They told me openSUSE Tumbleweed has stability from testing while being very up to date. Is that true? Also, is there anything else about openSUSE that makes it unique? Anything else I should know before trying it out?
edit: wow, I expected like 2-3 responses, not this many, and especially not one from the openSUSE Chairman, lol. I think I'll try tumbleweed then.
Yes, it is true. I have been running openSUSE Tumbleweed for nearly a year now. Nothing has broken during the many, many updates. Not one break. That's impressive.
YaST is unique to the openSUSE/SUSE distros. It's a great help with administering your system.
Open build service alone makes it worth it. I can quickly drop into the command line and build a package in my very own repo or branch. Additionally, I feel like the barrier to contribute is practically non existent. Submitting fixes to the distro is also one single command. I don't have to apply to be a maintainer or go through endless loops to have maintainers listen to my requests.
I started using Linux because I wanted to be part of community and I feel like openSUSE empowers me to do that.
There new heading is also to be commended, they are embracing the best tools from other distros rather than trying to invent their own solution for a problem that has already been solved. This is evident in the fact SLES15 will now use firewalld, rather than SUSEFirewall2. Plus it's German engineering.
I have been using openSUSE Aeon for at least 6 months now, in this post I talk about my experiences, difficulties and reasons why I use aeon and for whom aeon is suitable.
how was my start?
You install Aeon and everything you need runs. You install it, make your favorite settings in gnome control center and install your favorite software via gnome software (flatpak). you don't have to worry about any drivers (except nvidia) and everything runs right out of the box.
You only need the terminal if the application is not available as a flatpack (in my case all my favorite graphical applications are available as flatpaks), but even for distrobox there are applications like BoxBuddy so you don't have to use the terminal even once if you're not a fan of it.
Exception: for wine (selinux) you have to enter a single command in the terminal, but everyone should be able to do that
problems with aeon
I had very few problems with Aeon. If a software is not available on flathub, you just use distrobox, which is not a problem. of course there are the general immutable distro problems like software like GdmSettings not working. but that's not aeon's fault and it's a general problem. people who rely on software like openrgb also have no problems, with such software you just have to put the udev rules in the appropriate folder. and if you need to install software the classic way (like important drivers for example) this is also easily possible with transactional-update.
Strength
there are many strengths of opensuse aeon compared to other distributions. you do not have to worry about updates, because they are done in the background without any performance loss. and if an update fails, you can simply select an old snapshot in grub and try again, although i did not have to do this once. i dare to say that aeon is the most stable distribution i have ever used. since it uses containers and the host system is read-only, it is safe from attackers and viruses. since you do not have to take care of the system yourself, you have more time for your work or games, etc.
Gaming
gaming is also no problem. after giving wine the rights to work, you can start right away. steam works via flatpak out of the box and for other games you can use bottles or the heroic launcher. the performance is also what you expect.
conclusion
opensuse aeon is the perfect distribution for people who want a stable, up-to-date operating system and don't want to take care of the system because it is done by itself in the background.
Aeon has stopped my distro hopping and I am very satisfied and will continue to use it. also perfect for me is that aeon has no bloatware at all. but if you want to configure the system completely on your own and everything down to the smallest detail, tumbleweed is a better choice. i think aeon is also a good option for beginners as it is almost impossible to destroy the system
finally, i would like to give respect to all those who have developed and maintain aeon!
I started using Linux with the idea of making my PC faster yet beautiful.
My first experience was Linux Mint and it was great, but I really wanted a KDE Desktop to have a more aero approach and tried installing KDE within mint, doesn't worked that well for me, so I changed to Kubuntu.
Kubuntu was okay, it was usable and fast compared to Windows, but my updates was really messy and not felt okay using in that state.
So now I am in open suse and man it's really great. The updates is stable yet fast, rarely anything breaks apart and my desktop looks the way I wanted.
I am trying to find a fair comparison of Tumbleweed to Arch. I have used both (though I admit I have more experience with Arch over Tumbleweed) and really like various aspects of both that I like and dislike; for example, I have had more bad updates from the arch repos with no way fix them, but OpenSUSE takes extra steps to prevent it from reinstalling software I remove. On the flip slide, I overall enjoyed the feel of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed more than Arch, but I felt like Arch "felt" more bleeding edge which was nice sometimes.
All the Arch and Tumbleweed comparisons I have seen have been from an Arch user who gave Tumbleweed like a week and presented the discussion to other Arch users mostly.
I am wondering why y'all have chosen OpenSUSE (in general, but Tumbleweed users would be appreciated) over something like Arch or Ubuntu.
I started with Linux waaaay back in the early years - mid-1990s. At the time, there were fewer choices, and I tried out what was then known as S.u.S.E. I then distro hopped through all of them... Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, Mandrake, Corel, Oracle Unbreakable, etc., etc.
I'm currently running Tumbleweed and love it. It's the best balance between bleeding edge and stable. The QA guys do an AMAZING job of making sure it's all REALLY well tested before things are deployed into the update repos. It's rock solid, and really professionally put together. Honestly, other than the initial setup warts, it's one of the very best distros out there, especially if you're a KDE fan.
Arch? I love it, but it's a LOT more work to install and keep things humming along smoothly than openSUSE Tumbleweed. Like you pointed out, sometimes updates trash your system. I found that I had to be MUCH more in synch with the community, participating in the forums etc to keep up with what was happening... so I knew when I could cleanly/safely update and when to wait etc. The Arch documentation is really the very very best out there, and I often refer to it when trying to figure out obscure things in openSUSE.
Ubuntu... tried it many many times over the years. I dislike it for a lot of reasons... most of them technical. Ubuntu makes certain choices that I don't like mainly because I come from a more "pure" Unix background. They "break" some unwritten Unix rules to simplify things. It works, and there's nothing wrong with it... but I just don't like how it's done. Ubuntu feels to me like a great starting OS, but once you grow up and mature, you shake off the proverbial training wheels and use an adult distro. The other reason I won't use Ubuntu... Gnome. To my preferred way of thinking/working Gnome is probably the MOST annoying GUI ever made. It's counter-intuitive for me, and frustrating to the point where when I'm forced to use it I sit back and wonder WTF, they removed that option too? And I find myself thinking OSX is better... and that's saying a lot since I detest OSX (despite having to use it daily for my work).
So back to openSUSE. It is NOT perfect, but no OS ever is. I always tell people... if you choose to use openSUSE, do a default install, add the Packman repo, and switch priorities to pull first from Packman before checking the standard repos. That usually clears up almost 100% of the complaints people have with openSUSE (missing core apps, or core apps which are intentionally compiled without proprietary bits.... like VLC which is useless if pulled from the standard repos, but fully functional from Packman). What I REALLY like is I can do a zypper dup pretty much any time and it'll just update cleanly without breaking my install. I haven't had a breaking update in a couple of years now... it really just works and stays working.
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The btrfs/snapper snapshots give me the comfort that if things should for some reason break in the middle of the workday, I can reboot, choose the previous snapshot to boot into, do a "sudo snapper rollback" and I'm good again. I can then retry the update, or whatever I felt the need to do that broke things, on the weekend.
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zypper is incredibly robust. Which means two things: 1) I actually trust it to not fuck up, as long as I don't fuck up. So, doing those thousands of package updates per month that you do on a rolling release, just doesn't feel as risky with it. 2) I can sidegrade to openSUSE Leap, if I feel like I need a more stable system for the next few months (just take out the Tumbleweed repos, put in the Leap repos and then do a dist-upgrade).
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I prefer the community. Arch feels somewhat elitist and like it has a lot of trolls. openSUSE feels like family.
Two opensuse devs talk about how opensuse is viewed by the rest if the world.
And they gave a harsh and honest view.
Imo, ubuntu sux. RHEL offers the best enterprise solution.
Opensuse offers the best desktop os.
https://youtu.be/D_bM0KaL_7M?si=XD4fPxf_dE1BJwFs
I've been distro hopping the last while. I enjoyed the stability and performance of Debian but the software was too old. I tried Fedora but had to use the somewhat hidden everything installer to have a decent installation that wasn't slow and bloated. Then I still had to customize a bunch of things after installation. Fedora has some benefits, but I'm not a big fan of the release cycle.
Tried out openSUSE Tumbleweed as it's a rolling release and it was fairly impressive. Everything looked very professional from the website, installer, and out of the box experience. I'm not sure why people say this distro is hard to install. The installer gave lots of customization options. It was a bit slower to install but that's not a major issue when considering I had plenty of choices to decide what to install. Out of the box, even the default theme looked good.
From what I can tell, openSUSE is like the stability of Debian, the newer software of Fedora, and the rolling release of Arch without the same level of maintenance? Is this too good to be true or is openSUSE just super underrated?
Tried Ubuntu, Fedora and lastly OpenSUSE, OpenSUSE is my favorite so far.
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Unmodified pure Desktop environment (GNOME) (unlike Ubuntu).
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Rolling release with new features and version releasing ASAP (the reason why I left Fedora since GNOME 42 landed on OpenSUSE first).
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Snapper and snapshots to the rescue.
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Yast which provides an easier way to manage packages and patterns.
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Good documentation
overall, nothing to complain about so far.
I've used and I am accustomed to Tumbleweed since a while now. This is my first time using Leap, and I thought I'd share my experience to give some insight to people contemplating trying or using openSUSE Leap 15.6. This review is especially destined to users already on Tumbleweed. I have tested it on 3 different desktop machines (ranging from an 8 years old middle range HP to a high end Acer gaming rig from last year).
Installation:
The installation process is almost identical to Tumbleweed. The installer is still as thorough and reliable, with a complete set of options to fine tune your install while remaining easy enough to use. Coming from Tumbleweed, you will feel right at home.
Under the hood:
The choices made are in my opinion very sane, and an excellent balance between reliability and modernity. The 6.4 kernel will handle most modern machines, and the integration of the new PulseAudio 17.0 and PipeWire 1.0.4 is definitely a plus. If you unselect the software packages during install, you will end up with a minimal and unclutured system with only the most essential and basic apps. The Nvidia drivers 550 were also a nice surprise: I didn't expect such new drivers for a "stable" release. For example Ubuntu 24.04 comes with the 335 version. Thankfully, YaST and its wide array of tools are there as well.
GNOME 45 implementation:
An excellent choice as version 45 is modern enough while proving to be very reliable. All the settings and components are very well implemented and the experience has been flawless for me.
KDE Plasma 5 implementation:
I have tried virtually all distros running KDE, and this is the best implementation I have ever seen. KDE Plasma 5.27.11 is the latest and also the last update there will be, so this is the peak of what version 5 has to offer. It doesn't get as stable as this. All components and settings are ideal, and it has been a lightning fast and reliable experience on my machines. In comparison to Kubuntu 24.04 (also using the same Plasma 5 version), the difference is striking: Leap 15.6 has proven to be faster and without any bugs or issues. The addition Qt6 version 6.6.3 (on top of Qt 5.15.12, KDE Frameworks 5.115.0) makes Leap 15.6 future-proof and makes a lot of sense.
Xfce/other DEs:
From the time I've played around with it, Xfce 4.18 is as stable as ever and similar to Tumbleweed. Same as for Tumbleweed, I love the default settings made (with Xfce there can be striking differences between distros). I did not tried other DEs.
Issues I encountered:
Leap 15.6 has been a flawless experience for me, with the exception of the kernel-included open source NVIDIA "nouveau" drivers. On one of my latest machine (RTX 3060), the screen was locked to a 800x600 resolution with no sound output. On another machine (GTX 1060), there was some visual glitches upon restart. All issues were resolved with the installation of the closed-sourced NVIDIA drivers, so this is only a minor annoyance until the drivers are properly installed.
In conclusion:
I never really paid attention to Leap as I always thought it was "boring". And boring it is, but in the best "reliable and steady" possible way. If you don't care for having the very latest and constantly updated system, and you want a "set and forget" OS, you should definitely give Leap 15.6 a try.
Personal advice:
I recommend making a minimal Leap 15.6 install, and using Flatpaks for everything else (when possible). This will ensure your system has as little dependencies as possible, and that all your apps will continue to be updated to the latest version, avoiding the frustration that often comes with "stable" distros (out of date packages).
Disclaimer: I'm not the review author.
Ubuntu 16.04 will be officially released very soon. I've had 10 years of mostly good times using various Ubuntu. Now, for various reasons, I'm considering installing a non-Ubuntu distro for daily use.
What are the good and bad things I need to know about OpenSUSE before maybe switching?
I've used both Ubuntu and OpenSUSE recently.
Pros of OpenSUSE:
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Part of the success of Ubuntu was its 6 month release cycles, which gave a balance between stability/predictability (like Debian stable) and new software (like Debian unstable). Both Leap and Tumbleweed offer their own very appealing approaches to getting this balance right. Leap is like Debian stable but with more up-to-date desktop packages like KDE/GNOME, while Tumbleweed is like Debian unstable or Arch but with more extensive testing and with a goal of actually being constantly a usable desktop.
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OpenSUSE comes with btrfs and snapper by default, which allows for easy filesystem snapshots. If you're messing around with system files and you break something, or if an update breaks something, you can easily roll it back and it'll be just like nothing happened. Once I installed a desktop environment, decided I didn't like it, and instead of trying to uninstall with the package manager (since I might not get everything), I just did a rollback.
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The Open Build Service provides a set of repos with a lot of extra software (with various versions) from unofficial and semi-official repositories. This gives you a lot of control over your system. For example, if you want bleeding edge KDE updates for your Leap system, you can use KDE Argon. It's like using Debian stable with the completely newest KDE backported. (The OBS also automates a lot of the build process, which is just plain cool!)
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I've had some wonderful members of the community help me with some issues I had by going through it step-by-step over a series of posts. I think that people in the community often feel more of a personal connection to their distro, which is cool.
I know I'm on the OpenSUSE subreddit and some people might not like me including cons here, but it's necessary for the whole story:
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Some proprietary software doesn't come packaged for OpenSUSE. For example, insync (for google drive) doesn't have an OpenSUSE package. The Fedora package worked for me on Tumbleweed, but not on Leap (it depends on a higher version of a program than what Leap has).
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OpenSUSE relies on external (non-official) repositories to a greater extent than other distros I've used, including (but not only) for certain things like codecs that they don't want to officially package for legal reasons (which isn't their fault, but it's still a fact about experiencing the distro). This would be fine, except that I've also had more problems with external repositories on OpenSUSE than on any other distro (whether the AUR in Arch, PPAs in Ubuntu, or external repos in Debian). And there seems to be an odd attitude in some parts of the community where, if you have problems with external repos, it's all your fault for using them in the first place... Except that reasonably speaking they're necessary for most people, especially for codecs.
I'm on openSUSE since 15 years (SUSE Linux earlier) and don't intend to change to any other distro for my main client system ;)
I have recently tried out OpenSuse Tumbleweed and boy oh boy do i like it. The thing i like most is that it is rolling release, nearly bleeding-edge and it is stable! I rarely hear anyone talk about OpenSuse, whether it is a complaint or praise. I feel like OpenSuse is highly underrated. What do you guys think and what is your experience?
I use linux mint can you give me some reasons to switch to opensuse?
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?