Hear me out, the mascot is a freaking chameleon, that’s cool as shit man.
Also it’s a German engineered distro, German engineering wins again!
Zypper is just a funnier name for a package manager and it has Tumbleweed which is arch but actually doesn’t break for once!
Your rebuttal?
Never tried it, but everyone I know who has tried it says its the most stable rolling release OS ever. That is pretty cool. Btrfs support is cool too, copy-on-write, deduplication, and whole-disk snapshot and rollback capability, its great for keeping your data safe.
I don't care about rolling releases, I get my stability from Debian, or sometimes Mint. If I want the latest software I’ll install Guix packages or FlatPaks. And I can still use Btrfs on Debian.
I used both tumbleweed and leap for a bit and they really are good. I’m actually using tumbleweed on a home server right now and it’s been a champ. But…
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My biggest gripe is opensuse seems to use different package names than any of the other distros for basic packages. I had to install a package that used capitals in the package name, and coming from mostly debian based distros, that made me rationally angry when trying to find the package I needed. I think it was network-manager or something that’s usually installed by default and I wanted something familiar.
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Online directions for setting something up usually has deb and/or fedora rpm directions, which is usually just some difference in package names and the equivalent install command, searching the base package will let you figure it out. I had very few issues following debian/Ubuntu directions and translating them for fedora. Opensuse is always non-existent so you always need to translate those directions for opensuse, which is usually like doing it for fedora until you run into point (1).
I agree that (1) is particularly painful on openSUSE, because of (2), and I do agree that Fedora tends to be more similar to Debian/Ubuntu, but package names differing between distros is pretty universal for any non-derivative distros.
For example, I tried to use
nix-shell, which basically lets you set up a small, reproducible build environment using packages from NixOS. And it was working excellently, except I could not figure out for the life of me, what the names of the NixOS packages are that provide certain C libraries…
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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.
Yup I agree, openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma desktop is just awesome. my favourite distro at this moment,
openSUSE also remains one of the only distributions that have automatic Btrfs snapshots setup out of the box. I am very surprised other distributions have not done the same. Especially Fedora, since they use Btrfs already.
IIRC, it was related to Fedora Atomic. Out of the box, Fedora Atomic offers functionality that’s very close to what you’d expect from Btrfs snapshots. It doesn’t use Snapper, but instead relies on
(rpm-)ostree; at least, that’s my understanding of it. So, in order to make Fedora Atomic more palatable and attractive, this feature was not directly built into Fedora. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if ‘politics’ play a role in this; Snapper is kinda like openSUSE’s project. While Fedora Atomic’s implementation is Fedora’s take. Unfortunately, it happens to be (by design) not available on traditional Fedora.
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.
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.
You find Zypper a better name than Pacman?
I would say
zypper upis the better command, just because it’s kinda funny.pacmanis better overall, but it gets less fun when you start adding arguments like-Syu, if only because it’s a “language” you have to learn and isn’t self-documenting in any way.Haha,
zypper upis a nice one, didn’t know that.Pacman gets huge bonus points though for having a config option to turn to progress bar shown during package installation into a ‘pacman’ (letter c) chomping from left to right :)
(done by adding
ILoveCandyunder theMiscoptions in/etc/pacman.conf)
I use openSUSE. Zypper is a PITA compared to pacman.
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.
Zypper may be a better name than apt, but it doesn’t have super cow powers.
🤦
“MY FAVORITE SPORTSBALL TEAM IS THE BEST!!!”
Can we just moderate these posts?
I would normally 100% agree with you. But if it’s an underrated distro, then I tend to be more lean on this. However, I agree that OP should have done a better job at ‘advertising’ openSUSE. For example; not mentioning YaST is just criminal.
Then JUST say that. You don’t need to be out here making insane and absolute statements.
I think I agree with the other commenter that you should just take a break.
Start a fanboy sub then? The noise ratio here is already way too loud.
I definitely hope that the noise ration will improve (by the amount of noise decreasing) over time. But, as it stands, the community is still relatively small. I get your grievances, but I honestly don’t know what the best set of directives would be.
So what should this community talk about then?
This post seems lighthearted and not mean-spirited. I do wish they said “awesome” or “great” instead of “the best,” but they’re not trashing other distros and it is relevant so I don’t see the problem.
At least it’s those positive things. From the influx of newcomers here, I just hate that they see posts like this before than can objectively see the field for the trees.
If this entire sub becomes “OMG THIS IS THE BEST”, it’s going to be nothing but noise real fucking fast.
Do we have a linux circle jerk community yet? If not, that might help.
Maybe you should take a break.
That person should take a break, I’m just jostling you know, bit of tomfoolery and joking around.
It’s almost like some people like that user should eat some snickers and read a book on bunny rabbits or something
Don’t worry, almost everyone did get the joke and it was funny imho.
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?
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.
