It seems like its a perfect distro. Rolling release so you get recent packages and dont have huge upgrades every few months, but not so bleeding edge that it breaks often. YaST is pretty cool but you are not forced to use it. Basic installation gives you enough essential stuff, but its not too bloated. The only thing its missing is AUR, but i still didnt find a program that i need and cant find in official repos or trough flatpak.
Honestly, now that i use it, it seems like insanity to install anything else. (for everyday desktop use)
Here are a few reasons I can think why some may not take to it. Trigger warning for Suse users
- Out-of-the-box aesthetics are pretty ugly (why are they still using that godawful default wallpaper?)
- Yast looks like the Windows 95 control panel (I guess this might be a plus for some people?)
- Zypper can be sluggish to update and install packages
- regular package updates are large, even compared to Arch
- Seems to have more frequent security/password prompts (a good thing for enterprise scenarios, but not always welcome or necessary on a personal PC)
It’s not bad by any means, but I’ve tried it out several times and always ended up abandoning it because of little niggles like the above.
Also it would sacrifice user experience over “security” - i.e. with default SElinux config proton may not work correctly - see this bug
Software avaliability can be a bit scarce too, mainly when compared to fedora or even arch’s aur
Yast to me looks reassuringly old and sturdy.
yast can be ugly, but effective. And aesthetics are definitely subjective. Agree about zypper though.
I see a lot of clueless interpretations of openSUSE in this thread. Like any other distro, you have to learn how it works. Most people here don’t want to bother and keep arguing that it doesn’t work like Arch, etc. Well, it’s not Arch… duh.
Of course, by now, you’ve realized that the defaults are good and it’s very stable. Unlike other rolling distros, it rarely breaks from an update because every release is automatically tested. BUT, issues do arise with the repo NVIDIA drivers, which don’t always get built fast enough to work with newer kernels as they are released. It’s not a big deal because you only need to wait ~1 week, but surprisingly, the maintainers don’t preemptively address it. Also, codecs can be problematic because, like the NVIDIA repo, they lag behind and take time to catch up to the OSS repo. Annoying, to be sure, but if you are using flatpaks, it doesn’t matter.
And this is probably a shocker to most people here, but you don’t have to install Yast. I don’t use it at all. The catch is that you must learn something new and how to hold back certain packages.
It does not have the latest software. It’s my first beloved distro. then arch, now nixos.
It does not have the latest software.
Then openQA tests fail.
I don’t know, to be fair I didn’t used it for a long time, 3 years or more. several things may have changed.
It had modern kernel and software. It was the reason I use it. To support newer hardware. Thus was a year ago and I’ve been happy since. Maybe not Manjaro not master branch untested up to date, but as good as you’ll ever need.
If you like to brag that you use Arch or Gentoo, or you like a rolling update to occasionally break your system Manjaro style do not use OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Otherwise, go ahead and enjoy. I’ve used for over a year without issue. It’s fantastic.
you quickly feel like it’s not a distro for convenience but for enterprise productivity, yast is incredibly powerful and filled to the brim esoteric professionall options but little no no though for a casual experience, the repos don’t have much in the way of fun and are even software p*tent respecting meaning codecs and such need a separate config, the suse specific tools have their own theming , a lot of thing (like mounting luks volumes) require admin passwords… most of these can be remedied will a little tinkering but why bother when other distro are way simpler to tailor and already have a more comfortable experience out of the box
I started to use Tumbleweed three years ago and can’t complain much.
The only thing are patterns, because they bundle some software i dont use too – but i learned how i can avoid them.
I used it as a daily driver roughly a year or so ago. It was pretty good and actually worked really well. Personal experience was things only broke by the issue between keyboard and monitor.
If memory serves Steam ran pretty well on it and installing Nvidia was pretty easy too.
That post is misleading. Novell cooperated with Microsoft, and actually made money from the deal not the other way around. That no longer matters anyway since the SUSE company is no longer connected to Novell. Novell was bought out by Attachmate who then merged with Micro Focus. Micro Focus sold SUSE to EQT who made SUSE it’s own company. So while the Novell deal was bad for open source it no longer has any bearing on opensuse.
So OpenSUSE was bought and then it was bought and then it was bought and then it was bought and then it was bought and who knows who will buy it tomorrow.
I’m sorry I took long to reply, but you are still wrong. Whether or not the Suse company gets bought or sold has no bearing on opensuse since that is an independant entity. No patent encumbered software ships with opensuse. You would have to use third party repositories just like Debian to install them.
