Manjaro to Suse

Hi, I have been using Linux now for a bit over a year and have quickly moved from Linux Mint to Antergos to Manjaro. I am fairly happy with Manjaro, but have seen some great reviews about opensuse and thought I would ask the forums if there is anybody who has switched from Manjaro or other Arch-Based distro and what there thoughts were and/or any suggestions for me before migration?

I have used Arch for 12 years and still use it to this day. I dual boot between Arch and OpenSuse. What are your reasons for contemplating a switch? I have not used any of the Arch derivatives, so don’t have a base line for a good response. If you have specific questions, I might be able to shed a bit more light.

I dual boot because I love the simplicity and rolling release nature of Arch, and I love the ease and stability of OpenSuse. Arch gives me room to tinker and tweak things, while I don’t feel the need to do so in Suse.

I find that some things work better in one distro over the other. For example, I use gnome in both, and find the Cheese does not work in either (which may be a gnome issue). The Zoom meeting client works better in Suse than in Arch but I find that VLC tends to work better in Arch than in Suse. For Steam games, I find Arch generally out-performs Suse. Amazon Prime video streaming works equally well in either.

SO far as package management goes, pacman is a wonderful piece of software. I really enjoy it. However, YaST is out of this world good. It is probably the single reason I keep Suse around.

Welcome and sorry I cannot answer your question directly but it may be worth pointing out that openSUSE comes in two varieties: Tumbleweed which is a bleeding edge rolling distro and Leap which is aimed at those with more conservative tastes. Manjaro probably falls between the two. It depends what you are looking for - the heady excitement of trying the latest thing or something closer to Mint.

Two of the many things which distinguish openSUSE from many other distros are the variety of desktops which are supported and the package management system.

Perhaps you could let us know what you are looking for in a distribution.

Used Arch for several years but not as long as SwedishMeatball, probably 5 or so. My experience with Arch (not a derivative) has been mostly good. Pacman is a phenomenal package manager for someone who tweaks things like I did. My Arch derivative experience has been fine with respect to Manjaro but not used Antergos. I have been using Linux for 20 years and am at a point in my Linux “career” that I don’t care to tweak any longer: I just want it to work. OpenSuse Leap is my “just works” distro (mostly) and I am happy here because I don’t have to tweak. There are the occasional breakages but that fulfills my tweak need :slight_smile:

The only part of OpenSuse I find confusing is the package manager because I do it at the command line and am not sure what the right way to update the system is: I find the docs aren’t totally clear on this, which is odd to me. Arch has stellar documentation, but I find the opensuse docs to be lacking. Maybe I am looking in the wrong place, not sure.

If you are happy with Manjaro, stick with it. I spent years jumping around and wasn’t happy no matter what I did. All Linux distros are essentially the same and differ only in the package management technique and available software. Maybe run opensuse in a VM to see if you like it first?

Hi
Depends… for Tumbleweed it’s always zypper dup, others zypper up…

https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Zypper_usage

I’ve mostly been using zipper up which works, or seems to work fine. What is zipper patch for? That also appears to update as well. Are the repos refreshed during the zipper up process?

Sorry, not trying to hijack the thread!

Hi
Normally they will refresh on zypper up or zypper up -t patch (may pull in patches), but generally zypper up should be fine… then --no-recommends can be added if you don’t wnat to pull in lots of additional packages (language packages for example).

So a patch is the same thing as an update, at least in any other software environment I have ever worked with in the last 2 decades. I guess that’s the part that confuses me about the difference between “patch” and “up”. No worries, will continue to use “up”. I will definitely do a comparison between the output of “patch” and “up” next time I update though so I can see what each does.

Thanks for the answer.

Hi
The patch option will pull in all the other packages associated with the update, add some verbosity (-vvv) to see more on what is happening :wink:

As far as I know *zypper up -t patch *only installs updates from the official repositories, not from packman or other third party repositories.

Thanks for the answers, now that I have completely derailed this thread :slight_smile: