I was a user who only knew about windows and mac as desktop os’es until 2017. I learnt about linux through means i don’t quite remember, but i was obsessed with animals at the time, particularly chameleons. I discovered openSUSE and loved the cute chameleon icon and used to come across it once a while. I had also strangely learnt about fedora, but i did not have enough knowledge about linux yet so i didn’t bother with the idea.
Until in 2020. At the time, i had a laptop/intel tablet with very bad specs. It had 2gb of ram and 32 gb of space. Windows 10 murdered that machine. It was on 1803 and i couldn’t install any further feature updates to it. The funny thing was, i didn’t install anything on it. Plus it would crash when opening a few browser tabs. I still didn’t think about trying linux(Until the end of the year) but got more curious and thus found out about user-friendly distros like Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
September 2020 my interest for linux would swell uncontrollably. My windows install just started misbehaving for no reason. I powered it off, and windows booted up and showed a blue screen. No matter how many times i tried to recover it, it was all in vain.
We took it to IT specialists who installed Cloudready(Now Chrome OS Flex) but i found out that i couldn’t install apps from the play store(As i read about chromebooks) and could only use web apps from the web store. They put windows back on, which had no wifi(The reason they put Cloudready in the first place).
In the meantime i had gotten a better laptop(Dell Inspiron 5400 2 in 1) and i was very impressed(8gb of RAM and 512gb SSD). It didn’t have the problems my old laptop had.
But my old laptop/tablet was sitting down there. I was like, ‘i can’t leave it like this!’ I reinstalled windows so many times and then one part of my mind was like, “Why don’t you try the linux they talk about that takes very little space?” So i tried Linux Mint in June 2021(2 years using Linux as of the 29th) and was expecting it not to behave. Surprisingly, it came up with a notification that ‘wifi networks were avaliable’ in the live session.
Liking that it detected the one piece of hardware that windows failed to, i installed it. During the install, it asked me if i wanted to keep windows. I was like in my head, “Keep windows? No way!”
That install on the old laptop had lasted a year before i started to distrohop on it(Currently fedora budgie is on it). I set my sights on the new laptop. I looked for a daily driver distribution. Tried Ubuntu(and various flavours), Linux Mint, Manjaro and Fedora, but then i considered openSUSE.
I wanted to use Leap but the kernel at 5.3 then (15.3) was too old. I tried many attempts to install openSUSE. First, i used the net install and couldn’t get through because i didn’t know the correct spelling of my wifi network, and tried the live image. The live image (Those reading this that want to try openSUSE don’t use it to install!) took about an hour to install. I fell in love with Tumbleweed instantly and noticed how snappy it was. The only thing i didn’t quite like about it were the slow servers(I live in ZA which didn’t have good mirrors at the time) but ever since Late 2022 i’ve had no problem with downloading updates because of some wonderful people in Mauritius that are responsible for not only the Mauritian servers, but the South African and Kenyan servers…
Congratulations to the openSUSE/SUSE devs for creating such a wonderful distro! I will use it for years to come! And besides, with all the stuff that is going on with Windows(Regarding AI and Microsoft Accounts) i’m not likely to switch back unless something extremely attracting about Windows pushes me to (Which there isn’t because i don’t game that much ). I still dualboot but rarely boot into Windows. The only reason i’m keeping it around is for some functions that need Windows, but i haven’t had that urge in a while.