I use openSUSE. Zypper is a PITA compared to pacman.
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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The main reason I've steered clear of OpenSUSE is its commercial backing as opposed to being a true non-profit community distro like Debian or Arch.
Red Hat have influenced Fedora decisions before and obviously blew up CentOS as a RHEL clone when they had the chance. Canonical constantly make bad decisions with Ubuntu.
I will add that I've heard nothing but good things about SUSE and OpenSUSE. SLES sounds like a decent alternative to RHEL and the OpenSUSE community distros sound pretty solid.
Yeah, that's the first distro that I use in a long time (last time before that I was running some early version of Ubuntu MATE), and having a blast already. I also very like customizability of KDE Plasma 6.
I worked on a SuSE-derived Linux back in the day.
What we agreed we'd be getting: a working product ready for customization an extension as required. What we got: a corpse with the skin and organs removed, effectively kicked out of a van at our doorstep before it drove off.
It's not that the packaging was bad - it was - but that the environment in and relations outside the organization were terrible. As it impacted our work and probably impacted their quality long-term, I've avoided it since.
What's your recommendation for distro? Not arch or fedora please, bad experience with updates, both system broke almost always because i install a lot of software, so far only Debian worked good for me, but i want rolling release, maybe Debian sid gonna work for me, I've thinked of tubleweed recently but seeing your comment it got me thinking again
Not the person you asked, but wanted to offer my 2 cents.
So you want rolling release, with lots of software installed and it should not break.
- openSUSE Tumbleweed indeed seems like a logical fit.
- If you're fine with smaller projects, you could perhaps also consider
- Garuda Linux: Arch-based with Btrfs snapshots and Snapper; similar to what openSUSE Tumbleweed utilizes
- Siduction/SpiralLinux: both based on Debian's rolling release; also with Btrfs snapshots and Snapper
- If you're okay with 'immutable' distros, consider the following
- Fedora Atomic: current gold standard; the uBlue images specifically allow a very smooth transition
- NixOS: more 'powerful' than Fedora Atomic, but ridiculous learning curve
- blendOS: Arch-based. Small community and has only recently left alpha phase
Bazzite has finally got me to pay attention to Fedora derivatives again for the first time in like 15 years.
Granted; Fedora has always had relatively few derivatives. The same applies to openSUSE. While popularity definitely plays a role in this, there's more going on in the background that's out of scope for what this comment intends.
But yeah, Bazzite is excellent. And so is Aurora, Bluefin, secureblue and many more.
Anyone care to share their experiences with SUSE Enterprise Linux, or with the container focused OpenSUSE MicroOS? Looking to play around with it since it looks a lot more straightforward compared to RHEL (Red Hat looks great, just having trou_understanding their offerings as they have a ton) and hoped some folks knew a thing or two...
Got to admit, the zypper argument is compelling.
"zypper up"! is the best upgrade command.
You're forgetting that pacman can show a little pacman as the loading bar. Also I'm always happy to run updates so typing "yay" into my terminal just feels right.
My rebuttal is that I have never had arch not boot except me messing up the install 8 years ago when I was learning.
I installed a completely standard tubleweed install on a laptop, grub broke and tumbleweed wouldn't boot anymore during the first update that was recommended to me through a notification popup that brought me to an update GUI. This was just 2 years ago.
Arch you can boot by default with rEFInd. It is infinitely easier than grub, searches and finds boots by default, even if it is configured incorrectly, and has never broken once in 8 years while grub has broken many, many times. That is not an option with tumbleweed install.
There have 100% been package and dependency breakages on tumbleweed, just like arch and every single distro. It happens.
Documentation is meager at best for tumbleweed and related. Archwiki is unbeatable in that regard.
The AUR. Please, try to go install niche programs like EdrawMax, PulseView, etc... RPMs make it pretty easy after you find it. On arch it is "yay pulseview" .. "1" .. "y" .... Done.
They are all great distros with many pros and cons to each. Most people would be fine with any of them.
For example opensuse variants have btrfs with snapshot set up upon installation. That is pretty damn cool and useful!
That said, I am definitely going to try Kalpa because it is a fresh way of doing things.
To anyone still singing the "installation too hard" argument... Archinstall is so cool now.. The defaults are just so friggin sane and systemd-boot with UKI as the boot setup is really cool to just be able to choose in an installer. The partitioner is also so easy to use... Most pleasant experience with a Linux installer in recent years. Yes, I'm talking about Arch.
All that said, I love Tumbleweed. They're also working on providing systemd-boot and it was nice when I tried it. And the one thing that i haven't seen anybody else implement in a comparable manner is Snapshots. Gotta love it.
Why the fuck does it ask for root password to change every little thing? Want to change network password? Root password. Install a flatpak? Root password. Sneeze? You guessed it, root password.
I'd be using it instead of Fedora if it wasn't for that shit. I even tried to spin myself a custom OpenSuse ISO...
The default config for sudo is to ask for root password. I too was annoyed by this and had to change the setting to ask for the user password, not root, every time I used sudo.
It might be a bit tighter than Fedora, I haven't tried Fedora so I wouldn't know but Flatpaks can still be installed as user, no pw. All mine are, by default.
But you still need to add the remote... With a root password of course. At least last time I tried.
Surely, you could add a --user remote without a problem?
Probably trough the commandline, it has been a long time since I last checked, but not using the gui, which asked for the password for any repository modification.
Arch does not just randomly break and Zypper is unfathomably slow.
Arch does not just randomly break
You might be right. However, the experiences of my own and many others seem to 'contradict' this.
FWIW, I've run Arch and EndeavourOS in the past. And, for some reason, (seemingly) entirely out of the blue, it just stopped booting. I put in some effort with troubleshooting. But, at some point, I just got tired and/or didn't ever want to deal with this anymore and left it for what it is. I've left Arch behind me ever since.
To be fair, I've had a similar experience with Nobara. So, this is not necessarily an 'Arch-thing'. However, a significant part of the community has experienced similar issues on non-stable distros (i.e. distros that don't have a slow release cycle).
While I'd be the first to admit that this is (perhaps) merely a skill issue, the fact of the matter is that similar experiences on other OSes are practically non-existent. Hence, it's a hard sell to someone that has enjoyed 'stability' in the past.
Yup I agree, openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma desktop is just awesome. my favourite distro at this moment,
I think the issue with Suse is a lack of clear vision - SLE exists and it's very good to have a competitor to Red Hat in my opinion. OpenSuse is a bit of everything: there's Tumbleweed which's selling point is to be rolling release and fulfilled the role Sid has for Debian: be the basis for the stable distribution. However, the stable distribution which was rebranded to Leap is now based on SLE (and will be based on ALP with version 16 if everything works out). So Tumbleweed is just rolling along as a downstream of Factory, which is... another rolling distribution serving as the main development distribution.
Then there's also Micro OS, another rolling release distribution designed to host containers. Personally, I'd have found a minimal OS designed to be run in a VM - something similar to Alpine - more useful, but I'm not really a container guy. It's also supposed to switch to ALP if I'm not mistaken.
Oh yeah and there's also OpenEuler which is a free RHEL clone.
I wonder if all of this makes sense in some enterprise setups?
And then, last time I tried Tumbleweed (in fairness this was some years ago), after all this work with distributions tailored to specific cases, a build system with testing and so on, I run into a network configuration issue that couldn't be solved with YaST. I didn't know why they insist on keeping it, I guess at this point it's such cost fallacy. Anyhow, try searching for how to solve it with Suse, answers are usually use YaST. Turns out Suse uses their own solution for networking, which is wicked (that's not an adjective). This is started in 13.4.1.1 in https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-reference/cha-network.html. I don't remember seeing the option in the terminal YaST. Zypper also wasn't very convincing, coming from pacman.
All in all, from my point of view, they created a broad ecosystem that fills a lot of niches and yet just annoys me when I actually try to use it. In my opinion, their core tools are unremarkable at best.
Tumbleweed does also feed into Leap. Leap uses SLE packages for most of the core libraries, but then user-facing applications see new versions integrated from what's been packaged in Tumbleweed. Particularly, they also automate lots of the package testing in Tumbleweed, so that can be reused for Leap. Well, and also for SLE, which will also grab stuff from Tumbleweed when they do plan to upgrade their packages.
As for minimal VM images, they do offer downloads for those.
On this page, you can click on "Download", then "Alternative Downloads".
These don't seem to be available for Leap currently. Not sure, if it's because Leap 15.6 has only been out for a few weeks. Could also be that I'm missing something here.
As for Wicked, they only use it for server systems as the default, and they do make it easy to switch to NetworkManager, if you prefer.
YaST. I didn’t know why they insist on keeping it, I guess at this point it’s such cost fallacy.
What do you mean? I love the idea of a comprehensive central system config tool. I haven't used OpenSuSE in ages but it always stood out to me as a huge plus.
It's a nice idea when it works. But when it doesn't cover your case, you need to edit configs manually and hope that YaST doesn't decide to override them later. At least that's what I remember.
A good example of shitty YaST imo is the YaST sudo tool... Which doesn't work unless you first manually edit the sudoer file to remove two lines that specifically says that they are default configurations and should be changed by the distro maintainers...
Ah, I see, that's unfortunate. That's generally a real problem with tools that try to edit existing writable config files.
I really want to make a distro which is built on top of basically a GUI-first (at least for most general configuration) NixOS kinda thing, where you both have to go through the tool but it also doesn't limit you in what you can do. That's a huge endeavor though especially to get it right :^)
Not a fan of the chameleon, but I do like the branding on the other versions, like MicroOS. Looks like runes or Unown pokemon.
I'll concede that the logo is good but I found the package manager confusing. Also I like compiling packages from source so only a couple of distros allow me to fully dive into that. It's Gentoo for me, I'm afraid.
I always find it interesting, when people claim they don't like Arch, because it breaks, supposedly.
Out of genuine curiosity, what did you find, that kept breaking, that wasn't user error, and wasn't easily reparable?
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