I put Tumbleweed on my spare dev machine that I had setup Fedora on over the weekend, and, like with Leap, I actually am rather happy with it, too. I used Xfce, as I felt it safest to roll on. Gnome has a nasty habit of breaking existing extensions on new releases, some of which I consider essential for any usability. I recently found things like adding suspend to power management buttons, putting tray icons on top, and some uses of dash2panel either do not work, or now occasionally crash, on Fedora (31), which has latest gnome, even though those are listed as “compatible to install”. I did not want that kind of experience popping up after an update. KDE is also rather complex and the few complaints I hear about Tumbleweed seem traced back to a bad KDE related change in a snapshot.
While suse never was known for being an Xfce focused distro, Xfce on tumbleweed is actually a rather nice desktop with a rather pleasant default setup. For me, the real question is how it will behave as it updates over time. I have had some bad experiences with other rolling distros in the past, which is why I have been rather cautious about using them.
I can always migrate my KDE Leap system to Tumbleweed later if I do want to. But I also do like Xfce a lot, and it has a very nice default config. In any case I am really happy with all my opensuse systems to date.
Hi
Been running GNOME for a long time now (15+ years)… openSUSE and SLE, just recently the top icons changed (now use KStatusNotifierItem/AppIndicator Support) that’s really the only thing that has broken in recent months on my systems…
On Fedora 31, which I just ditched to setup Tumbleweed, dash2panel would mysteriously crash while in lock screen, so unlocking you would get app crash notifiers for it. Dash2dock still did work, but I prefer consolidating in the panel since much of the panel is normally wasted space in gnome, and this is even more true with widescreen monitors. I normally use suspend rather than shutdown, and the extension to add suspend to the power menu no longer worked. There also used to be an extension to pack icon spacing tighter on the panel, which is particularly useful if you also use dash2panel, which also no longer works. You are probably right about not needing to cling to old tray support, though. I have used gnome on other distros in the past, and back when gnome 2 was a “thing”, I actually somewhat preferred Xfce over it at that time, but I will say I have never used gnome on a suse distro. Of course I also had never tried Xfce on a suse distro before either, and I actually was rather pleased with what was done for it.
openSUSE maintainers apply a distinctive “flavor” or feel to XFCE and LXQt so that
For those looking for a “lighter” version of Gnome, they might try XFCE
and
For those looking for a “lighter” version of KDE, they might try LXQt.
I’ve also noticed that these DE look and feel very different on other distros…
For myself,
Since I typically use LXQt, I notice how different it is on Debian Rolling (For my Kali Pen testing) and Lubuntu.
Hardly recognizable when comparing to openSUSE LXQt, aside from the Desktop’s configuration panel common to all, there is nothing else that looks or feels similar.
Long time user of xfce on openSUSE here since 2002 it is always my main DE in openSUSE. This distro has always have a nice touch in xfce. It always have the latest release version.
In tumbleweed there is another one lighter than xfce and blazing fast and it is my second option. It’s the Enlightenment. Nice fast and well maintained by the maintainer.