I’ve installed OpenSUSE (15.1 Leap) on a few machines recently, just checking it out. I’ve used various distros over the years - Slackware, Ubuntu, Kali, Parrot, Mint, Fedora, etc. I have to say this is the best installer and best Linux distro I’ve used yet.
What really convinced me was the latest “Hey, I wonder if …” installation on a Surface Pro 3. I fully expected issues with networking at least, but everything worked fine. Almost everything autodetected and installed with no fuss. … and it’s F A S T.
On one install (on a VirtualBox VM) there’re some issues with Calibre seeing the books in my library, but I think that’s down to Dropbox rather than anything inherent in OpenSUSE.
Looking forward to hearing more about your future experiences!
If you haven’t seen the slide deck for my openSUSE presentation, it describes not only pre-install and and install decisions, it also describes recommended first recommended steps after install, some features you don’t find in other distros, more.
This is indeed great reading. Users, mainly in forum discussions, remember best the bad times in the 2000s. I refrained from new installations during 2010 -2014. Starting with *openSUSE 13.1 * substantial improvements were made. Now that openSUSE streamlined their development process the distribution is great again. But they need to improve on spreading the word.
A far as I am concerned. TSU2’s slide should be a MUST READ before a new openSuse users starts an install, and has good information for after the install as well!
It has some important links to things we all should read.
I too am very impressed with Leap 15.1. I have bounced around over the past 20 years and Suse was one of the first distros I used back in the '99 timeframe. I Use Gnome and the install is on a beefy PC. Everything works perfectly and the system is fast and responsive. I chose OpenSUSE Leap because I thought I read it is now based on their commercial versions, which to me says it is stable. Time will tell but I am impressed and happy at this point.
Homebuilt PC
Asus Z240-A Pro
i7-7700
64GB ram
256 GB SSD for OS
512 GB SSD for /home
I think that the new development model of openSUSE that brings Leap very close to SLE was one of the best decisions made by the openSUSE project in the last years - one can really see how the enterprise distribution benefits from the community one and vice versa.
Also unlike the CentOS/RHEL + EPEL model the packages in Leap (both inherited from SLE and additional ones) are together in one project (and a separate repository is used for backporting the additional community packages from Leap to SLE). This prevents problems with the additional community packages having to somewhat keep up with both the enterprise and the community distribution (which recently happened in EPEL with Python 2).
