Hello everyone. I’ve spent years on end using Debian based distros, mainly MX Linux and Mint. The experience was generally good but of late the newer releases have been riddled with bugs and compatibility issues. The one that sticks out the most is kernel 4.19 with AMD processors. It makes me wonder why a distro is realeased with a problematic kernel instead of a stable one giving the end user the option to upgrade or downgrade the kernel post-installation. Anyway enough of my rant. I thought i’d take a deep dive and head straight to using XFCE Tumbleweed. First impressions…smooth and responsive. I am hoping I will enjoy my experience with Opensuse. Manjaro users promised the world but unfortunately it failed to deliver at point of installation. So far so good with Suse. I will keep you posted :). My only hoppe with Suse is that there is a gui based app to remaster my running system e.g Pinguy Builder or Refracta tools
Welcome aboard.
Hi
Welcome to the Forum and openSUSE 
Welcome.
I view the AMD Ryzen issues to be almost entirely AMD’s fault because Ryzen technology introduced new ways how things might work.
I can only speculate on why the problems happened, and might be related to whether similar problems exist (or not) with the Windows kernel.
In any case,
Many of the Ryzen changes are revolutionary, and is a bold attempt to leapfrog Intel after years of chips performing in Intel’s shadow.
And for that reason, it was likely important for AMD to be as secretive as possible and might not have been consistent with the kinds of relationships and contract agreements you’d find in public Open Source and Publicly Licensed.
Hence, if I’m reading what happened accurately the Linux kernel will have to play catch up, and early compatibility and support is largely dependent on what AMD might have developed on its own pre-launch and on its own without the benefits of Community effort.
TSU
I would speculate that this is probably because many users care about the features present only in the latest kernels and because the newer the kernel the more security fixes are built in by default. It’s also probably easier to maintain a newer kernel. It must be quite the effort to maintain those “frankenstein” security patches for CentOS 3.x kernels 
and also sometimes these patches don’t actually fix the security problem they were meant to fix.
Please be aware that, the AMD Ryzen CPU and Vega GPU changes in the Kernel drivers have been back-ported to the Leap 15.1 Kernel – and the SLES/SLE 15 Kernels – by SUSE staff members.
- AFAIK, this part of the openSUSE Kernel maintenance is not being executed by openSUSE Community volunteers …
Welcome to the aboard.
With new hardware, such as AMD Ryzen, using a current kernel, such as 5.2.8-1-default is always the only working solution. I learned that the hard way with Skylake and i915 and ended up with Tumbleweed. openSUSE thoroughly tests. Nearly always updating worked flawlessly since 2016.
I thought i’d take a deep dive and head straight to using XFCE Tumbleweed. First impressions…smooth and responsive. I am hoping I will enjoy my experience with Opensuse. Manjaro users promised the world but unfortunately it failed to deliver at point of installation…
On the i7-6700K with its SSDs XFCE desktop pops up within a fraction of a second after login.
