A few more-or-less specific questions from someone thinking about switching from Ubuntu to OpenSUSE

English Open Chat
1

I have a 10 years old Lenovo laptop that runs Lubuntu 20.04 64-bit. The OS has started to behave weirdly some time ago (I must admit that to be an unintended consequence of my tinkering that went awry and could have been undone only partially). The way I see it, the time has come to re-install the OS. It is not to say that Lubuntu has not been serving me well enough, but I dislike certain things Canonical is doing with the OS: snap daemon, offers to switch to Ubuntu pro when running sudo apt upgrade (harmless messages, one may say, but according to my experience if someone decides to use ads, you should be awaiting more ads in the future), this recurring feeling that they kind of partially adopted the ideology «We know what is best for users and what users’ hearts really want, so we are entitled to enforce it upon them», absence of rolling releases (it is possible to do full upgrade to a newer version, of course, but many people who have done it report that they ended up installing the OS from scratch eventually) to name a few.

I have heard OpenSUSE is considered to be very stable OS and I am considering switching to it (I am interested in the Tumbleweed variant; less stable than Leap I suppose, but the idea of rolling releases rolls very well with me).

I would appreciate if you could answer a few specific and possibly naïve questions about OpenSUSE:

  1. Can LXQt/Openbox (I really like this pair) be set up without days of head scratching and some heavy compilation?
  2. Did you experience or heard about any difficulties of installing or using Anaconda, Py charm, Jupyter, R-studio (yes, data science)?
  3. I heard that Suse repositories contain less software than those of Ubuntu, which would be quite understandable given the size of Canonical’s OS user-base. Which options does one have in case some software he needs is not there, apart from compiling source code or using Appimage or Flatpak, if any? Is there any tool that makes it possible to install deb-files? I realise that should such thing exist, it is not something to be rely upon too heavily or in all circunstances, but it beats being in limbo due to library error(s) while compiling, so is this possible at least in principle?
  4. What is so special about YaST? I read that many people believe it to be one of the strongest points of OpenSUSE, but I don’t quite understand why. Judging by screen-shots in Google images, it looks a lot like any other control centre/configuration tool (at least its GUI variant). Does it contain more settings or tweaks than its equivalents?
  5. I read it on several forums that the package manager zypp (or is it zypper?) is considered by many to be superior to Ubuntu’s apt. What does it mean in practice (honestly, I did not have any problems with apt ever, I mean it installs, updates, uninstalls packages, it can try to heal, in case something went wrong, what else could one expect from a package manager)?
  6. I have habit of doing regular back-ups of the home directory (the hard drive is 10 years old…) with Rsync. The catch is that I don’t have choice, but to store those back-ups on NTFS volume. In case of hard disk failure, can such a back-up be used to recover BTRFS home partition (maybe the question is stupid, but I really know naught about this FS)?
  7. Anything you expect to be tough to swallow in OpenSUSE for a person who has spent many years in Ubuntudom.
2

Welcome!
I can’t answer a lot of the comparison to Ubuntu questions, since I’m a decades long OpenSUSE user, but I can help with a few.

  1. I use R-studio, Python (all sorts) and Jupyter, on the regular and have no issues. I also use SageMath (with a Jupyter notebook). I’m a mathematician/OR Analyst, so on the regular is very regular and often with large sets. I almost never use Anaconda, but I’ve never had trouble with it the few times I have. R-studio has a package available through YaST, which makes it convenient to grab. Similarly with TeXMaker & LaTeX (if you typeset your work).
  2. SuSE supports rpms too and I’ve had good luck with those when needed. There are also unofficial repositories that contain additional things. I haven’t found too much that I need outside the official repos, so not the best judge here.
  3. YaST is nice in part not just because of the config tools, but because you can do updates, add repositories, and complete software installation from it. I find that feature very convenient to new users who may not want to use zypper or for folks who aren’t as comfortable with command line installs and repository selection.

I’ll leave others to do the comparing to other systems with it.

Cheers,
SisPenguin

1 Like
3

Welcome!

After a quick test in a virtual machine (using an older TW installation ISO that I had hanging around on my system), I selected a Generic Desktop installation, and then in software selection, I selected LXQt. Looking at the details, I see that Openbox is selected as a part of that pattern, so it looks to be pretty straightforward to install it.

I’ve had occasion to use Anaconda once, but not any of the others, but I know folks who use pieces of this without too much trouble. Anaconda seemed to work fine here when I played around with it a few months back.

In the installer, I see rstudio (desktop and server) packages, as well as several for Jupyter. I don’t see Anaconda or Pycharm packages, but you may find those in other repositories.

You can add additional repos to get additonal software, and even build your own repo with the build service for things you want. Using repos from the build service can be a mixed bag, because anyone can create one, and whether they maintain it or not is up to them. You need to be aware of what you’re choosing to install, but there are lots of options.

There are also third-party repos that are well known, such as Packman (for multimedia codecs that are patent-encumbered) that expand the available software.

There’s a tool called alien that can be used to convert some .deb files, but dependencies can be named differently in different distributions, so that is not a great option. A better option is to use something like distrobox to install a containerized (OCI-based) distribution that you can then install Debian packages in for instances when you need that. Distrobox is actually one of the cooler technologies I’ve played with in this regard, and it’s avialable on pretty much any Linux distro these days that runs Docker.

Distrobox can also be used to run GUI apps.

YaST is one of the most comprehensive configuration tools around for Linux, and it concentrates all of the configuration into a single interface.

There are other tools that come close - I used Webmin for years before I came to SUSE in 2003 (I came from RedHat), and it covered a lot of the same configuration options effectively, but YaST is a very approachable administrative tool and it can do quite a lot that I just haven’t seen anywhere else.

I don’t have extensive experience with apt, outside of a few VMs (I have a Pop_OS! VM and a Ubuntu VM that I sometimes test things in). Zypper is very good at dependency management and letting you choose options when there’s a dependency problem. Generally for me it just works, though, and I don’t have to intervene when I’m running it to upgrade my Tumbleweed system.

Zypper combines with a btrfs volume set in the root partition to give you rollback capability, so if an upgrade goes wrong, you can reboot from an earlier read-only snapshot, verify it works, and then make that snapshot the live system. That’s come in handy a couple of times during upgrades.

If you opt for MicroOS, you use transactional-update to update the system, and the system itself is an immutable filesystem, which has its own benefits. MicroOS is based on Tumbleweed (and uses the same repos).

I would probably not use btrfs for a home partition - I use XFS myself for that, and leave btrfs for the root partition.

Backups of btrfs are a little more complicated because of how snapshots are handled. I don’t know all the details, but there was a recent discussion here on the forums about it.

Something to consider with Tumbleweed as a rolling release distro is to follow along the factory mailing list - particularly the release notifications for Tumbleweed, so you know what changes are coming to the system. It’s updated sometimes on a daily basis, and sometimes updates can be fairly large (we had one a couple of days ago that was a rebuild of every package due to the recent ‘xz’ security issue; it can also happen when a core library or compiler is updated, as that also tends to trigger a full rebuild).

2 Likes
4

Yes, just select LXQt in the installer, or run sudo zypper in -t pattern lxqt on an already up and running system, and LXQt with openbox will be setup for you.

1 Like
5

Your points have already been well answered. I’d just like to clarify a few possible confusions:

  • zypp is the library behind zypper - the software and repository management in YaST is equivalent to using the respective zypper commands, except that distribution upgrades (which are the standard way of daily updating a Tumbleweed system) are not supported - hence you probably want to get familiar with zypper anyways - and if you’re coming from apt, the switch should not be too difficult (theoretically zypper ships with an optionally installable apt interface, which tries to translate apt commands to the zypper equivalents behind the scenes - but it can require additional configuration because some packages, particularly libraries, might be named slightly differently, hence for day to day use I rather recommend just trying zypper directly - as said, it’s not too different for average needs)
  • if you use rsync for backing up your home directory, it does not matter which file system you use
3 Likes
6

I appreciate everyone’s answers. The picture is much clearer now. It is not that I read anything that would be a deal breaker for me. Given that I shall proceed to installing OpenSUSE in the nearest future.

P. S. It seems they were telling the truth. The OpenSUSE community appears to be a friendly one in deed.

2 Likes
7

Keep the forum updated how you get on

1 Like