What did you like about openSUSE/SUSE that caused you to switch to it? For me it was Tumbleweed.
I switched around 2006, which was before Tumbleweed existed.
I was managing some SunOS/Solaris computers at work. And Sun had a demo CD for ājava desktopā, which was basically a live SUSE 9 CD with Gnome. I liked it. And I was near retirement, which was a good time to switch. Before then I had been using Slackware and Solaris x86.
I later switched to KDE for desktop ā I think that switch came with openSUSE 11.3, mostly because Gnome was becoming increasingly difficult to configure for the way I wanted to use it.
The end of Caldera which I had used before.
Started in 1998 with a set of Slackware disks, but had also the S.u.S.E. 5.4 box. Preferred the latter and basically never left. Now on Tumbleweed, since it exists.
I was working for Novell at the time Novell acquired SUSE (2003); I was teaching a class that used a RedHat system, and migrated to using SUSE Linux Professional (as it was called at the time) after the acquisition, and started using it on my personal systems so things would be consistent.
I had already been using Ximian GNOME on my RedHat system (along with their RH updater), so when Novell acquired Ximian, it all just kinda fell together, and Iāve been running it since.
I had been running Leap (and its predecessors) until last September, when I got a new system and decided to take the plunge with Tumbleweed, and havenāt looked back.
Iāve used it on and off since the S.u.S.E days.
I was working on another small-market distribution, back around 2011, that decided to shutter the doors, due to the project lead losing interest. We looked at rebasing the product on openSUSE, and decided that it was silly, and just decided to contribute to openSUSE instead. Been here ever since.
I installed Tumbleweed for the first time a couple of weeks ago - prompted by curiosity from the comment on the KDE Community Wikiās page for the Kubuntu Backports PPA about the quality of rolling releases. Havenāt really been able to contribute anything other than one bug report so far, but as an end user itās been an overall great experience!
Started with Slackware and moved at an certain stage to Mint but wanted a distro that properly supported KDE and found that was OpenSuse 13.2. When Tumbleweed came made that switch and quite happy with it.
I supported Walmart (until I was force retired) and they went SLES 11 in 2009 so I left RedHat Fedora and OpenSUSE 15 years ago.
Walmart still uses SLES on hundreds of machine under VMware.
Tumbleweed
Fastest Vanilla Gnome updates for new Versions.
The lates and greatest but rock stable.
Made in Europe
What I donāt like
It is the only Distro (from around 20+ I used) where the Printer/Scanner does not work out of the box and the Distro does not even help to make it work.
And it takes forever to make the system minimal and keep it like that.
Just started with Linux in 1998, with somthing that was called Linux 2000.
installed S.u.S.E 6 later on a old pc together with Gentoo.
Now still on openSUSE on laptop and pc with Tumbleweed. Used Linux also at work for teaching students to understand whats on servers and too irritate a lot of IT persons .;-).
I entered the world of GNU/Linux around 2010. Just a casual user, still am. I like things to work though. Disappointed with crashes, both software and operating system I begun distro-hopping. I soon discovered openSUSE. blew my mind that such solid stability could be accomplished but offer newer software than other distros had offered me.
That was the beginning. Since then I have come to appreciate many other aspects of openSUSE. I have tried so many other distros but openSUSE is always the most polished and overall the best. The devs donāt get enough appreciation.
Using Leap btw.
I donāt remember the why. I guess I just wanted to try Linux. I started with SuSE 9.0, which was just before Novell bought it. I even ended up getting the Manual/disk, but I have no idea where that went over the years. I moved to Arch when rolling releases were new. After Tumbleweed came out, I let it get settled in and came back. I find it just as fresh as Arch, but more stable (usually). At least here, we donāt have to worry about the Manjaro devs breaking something.
I do run Steam and MechWarrior Online, but that is the extent of my gaming experience here on Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed runs it very well and I am quite pleased with it.
Iāve defaulted to Debian for at least a decade for its trustworthiness and tendency to be conservative, then jumped to Tumbleweed recently. I was running bookworm during the hard freeze noticing a few minor bugs in KDE, and the thought of having to wait for the whole next release for fixes was making me very sad. Iāve always had the worst luck with stability running ātestingā directly so I started looking into rolling distros and found a lot of love online for OpenSUSE.
I think part of me aspires to be a certain kind of ācoolā user who doesnāt care for the latest gizmos and features, grouchily preferring their system to be solid, battle-tested and a thoroughly predictable tool. When I get past that, it turns out that having the latest software is rather fun.
Switched to openSUSE 8.4 due to hardware update costs on each major update of Windows.
Also had problems with backwards compatibility after Windows updates.
Windows user agreement reduced installation capability across machines after each update.
openSUSE usually fixes update anomalies within a few days.
NB: Initially windows install was free with purchase of Open Office Spreadsheet and allowed install on two PCs.
I was using Ubuntu LTS for many years because all I want is stability. I donāt care about the rest. I want to use applications, and forget about the OS.
But Snap ended my patience.
In search of a replacement, I was considering Leap, because I tried it before, it was stable, I just add issues with some application that I could not get to work on it. And then I read that Tumbleweed was equivalent to Leap in terms of stability, so I installed it.
Started messing around with Knoppix int the 2000ās and wanted to install a real distro on my HDD, done some distro hopping but SuSE 10.0 hit the spot bc i was a noob for the command line. YaST was the biggest influence and Mandriva lost at the end to SuSe.
I first tried Linux after the monstrosity that was Vista, about 2010 I think. Not sure why now, but my first install was Mepis. Gnome (Gnome 3 then?) worked well, but I couldnāt get KDE right on the Fujitsu laptop I had at the time. Reading up more and more, OpenSUSE came across as mature and a more enterprise oriented distro, so I switched (this would be 11.x or thereabouts I think), and absolutely everything worked, including KDE. Never looked back, and now we have two old Lenovo laptops, and an Entroware Triton each running Leap 15.4 (Iāll get around to upgrading to 15.5 soon), and a new Lenovo on which Iāve taken the āleapā and installed Tumbleweed.
I started out in linux arround 2018/19 installing ubuntu mate on flash drives so I wouldnt have to install a new hdd in an old laptop. After experimentign with lots of distros like mangaro, full fat ubuntu, linux mint and fedora, I found opensuse.
I liked it because the installer was nice and let me do everythingā¦
I first descovered opensuse when they still pushed the live images with the different desktop environents and I could flash them to a usb and carry them arround with meā¦
After installing ipensuse, I found the package set o be nice and i loved the roling release aspect of tumbleweeed and the rpm base so I could install rpmās from fedora if I was to lazy to find a suse compatible release of an app.
From there, I started to dig deeper and play arround with the commandline for the first time ever and srota fell in love with bieng able to change stuff quickly. no more hunting through windos settings for icons that all looked the same for settings that didnt really o much.
after experimentinf for a while (still on the old laptop) I tried to install gentoo for the extra āperformance benefitsā.
after booting into live ubuntu and pressing coppy and paste more times than I thught was humanly possable, I was installed and technicly working with no internet or de. I quickly abandoned gentoo because i did not feel like trying to get wifi wrking and wait about 3 yeas for every component to install.
After switching back to opensuse and installing it on a harddrive, I felt just how much faster it was on old hardware than windows, not to mention the amazing range of software that didnt need an exe to installā¦
I discoved yast and it was pretty much the same striy as the commandline: fell in love, went mad, came back to reality.
still usin suse tho this day and going to make the permenant switch to linux on my main laptop on monday
What brought me to openSUSE was that the Yast installer was able to install openSUSE flawlessly to an external drive, where I could choose to encrypt my system, whether I wanted a root account, could choose the filesystem, which I think is very important to choose at the installer stage, whereas other installers like linux mint could not install to an external hard drive without manually setting the partitions.
But what makes me want to discontinue using openSUSE:
- The use of Discover for package management. I think most new users would not know of zypper.
- Multimedia codecs. What a joke. Big big turn off that multimedia codecs donāt work properly in openSUSE, even when you have installed (supposedly) the codecs that your file requires.
- Being asked to respect openSUSEās branding and to identify it as such and not as āopensuseā.
Iād really love for YaST to be able, when doing an upgrade from a live openSUSE distribution, to be able to convert the system from the MBR layout to GPT.