Leap will exist for the forseeable future, so don’t worry.
I hope so, I really hope so!
I installed first time Leap last year in November, I think. When I found out that it will be discontinued I remove it and switch back to Debian stable. Then I was curious about its future and in 15 jan. I read that it will stay. Since then, now are 3 months, I am on Leap. If Leap goes away I probably give a try to Slowroll but most probably I will go back to Debian stable. Rolling releases are too much for me, I never tried, I don’t have such a good knowledge and experience in Linux, and also it seems to me is a time consuming process to maintain an instance of rolling release.
I first started using Linux over a decade ago, and back then I was using Fedora GNOME. Only a few years later I decided GNOME wasn’t quite for me, so… I think I tried KDE on Fedora first, but then at some point I decided to find a distro which had more of a focus on KDE. At first I hesitated on openSUSE a little because apparently using printers required root privileges, something Linus Torvalds also commented on if I’m not mistaken, lol.
At any rate, after jumping over to openSUSE Tumbleweed I’ve never really looked back and haven’t seen much reason to try anything else.
These days I have my eyes on Guix, especially due to Lisp (Scheme) being central to it. I’ll need some more experience before jumping over there though…
There was a point in time when I got in trouble with my parents for repeatedly deleting wpcmon.exe
(basically the parental controls app on windows) and my dad installed Ubuntu on currently defunct desktop,(Helpful advice: never use the YAST partitioner, it will unmount your system disk and brick your machine even if you tell it not to) I ended up enjoying the Tumbleweed experience so much that I installed it on my laptop when I got it (funny thing: it had windows 7 on it but had a windows 10 sticker and thunderbolt 3 usb-c), and I have been using my laptop ever since, mostly because my laptop is more powerful than my desktop overall and its easier to carry around (duh)
also heres something silly about my desktop
my desktop : core i3 with AMD/XFX gpu (i dont know much else i just never checked)
my laptop : core i5 6th gen with integrated graphics
(quite a silly difference between systems when you consider the form factors)
Like some others here, I started with Mandrake, many years ago. Have tried several different distros and had used Ubuntu for the last several years. (Even my wife is now using Ubuntu.) A few months ago I found a spare laptop and decided to try, one after the other, Alma, Pop, FreeBSD, Fedora (again), Manjaro, openSUSE Leap, and another that I can’t recall. Was impressed by openSUSE, so installed it on my main computer. And here I am. I like the control provided by Yast and the no-nonsense layout of the KDE desktop. OpenSUSE also looks and feels more business-like than some other distros. I have no intention of trying a different distro for the time being. I might even be here to stay.
I was all consumed with Solaris / openSolaris until that internal sabotage by Jonathan I. Schwartz sold Sun Micro to Oracle. At that time Red Hat was all the rage, but I wanted something different. I was at Circuit City one day and saw the Gecko logo for SuSE 8.0 on the shelf and I’ve only used SuSE / openSUSE ever since and have no interest in any other distro.
No, @hcvv , I didn’t miss that.
I forgot.
But, it is STILL worth keeping open, LOL.
A rolling system with very new packages in tumbleweed, and it’s more stable and user-friendly compared with Arch.
Had Novell certifications and worked with Novell NetWare. Bought a copy of 9.3 that came boxed with manual. Gradually began the learning process, jumped to OpenSUSE at some point, and haven’t lost interest since. Solid KDE user, never found a desktop I like better. Longtime Leap user, switched completely to Tumbleweed a few months back. Great system!
@fuscop I tried the 9.2 version from a computer magazine and then brought the 9.3 boxed set… moved to SLED and SLES after that, as well as running openSUSE on a couple of machines… Now Tumbleweed is my primary system, but still have a couple of SLES systems as well as Leap and MicroOS…
Tumbleweed because change is the new way of life
Just kidding - got tired of endless compilations in Gentoo, OS/2 is out and OS’es with an ‘u’ and ‘x’ in the name really has my heart.
Coming from CPM at work (yeah, I’m that old:-)) and later forced to work with PC-DOS (at the time I thought it was great). In the mid 80s I used the MacIntosh 128K/+ , some really great software for the time. But often stuck with DOS, GEM and Windows at customers. Not much fun.
I had been reading about Multics/C/UNIX and in the late 80s got some real exposure to Xenix and real UNIXes - almost an epiphany and I felt at home, at last. Not many (free) apps for personal use though.
Turned to OS/2 and it was very good, almost excellent from a software developer pov if you were into OS/2, DOS and Windows development, stayed there for quite some time. During the 90s Windows NT came at work and it was also very good albeit a little slow, I really liked 3.51 - no blue screens or other hiccups, for me at least.
Do not ask me about Windows NT 4.0.
In the early 90s someone gave me a diskette with a unix look-a-like kernel versioned 0.9something, a few years from then I ran Slackware on several computers, firewalling et.c.
LFS was great for learning and Gentoo (excellent system, excellent documentation) for several years on personal systems.
At work we focused on UNIX for server applications, several flavors/derivatives of UNIX, liked them all for one or the other reason.
When Apple switched to FreeBSD I went there and has never really left but their hardware/software life cycles are too short for personal use I think, so why not try Suse Tumbleweed on my aging macbook ? I did and it has been a pain free and pleasant experience, so far. We’ll see what Murphy has to say about that…
While all this was happening I must have tried or used most every UNIX, lookalike and GNU/Linux one can think of including Minix (bought the book and ran the software).
During the 2000s worked with/against the Microsoft offerings Server 2000 and 2003 and the matching client software and it was a struggle me thinks. Possibly a little better from Server 2008 and on.
All in all fun most of the time, now that I’m retired - it’s fun all the time.
Cheers!
It certainly is a good discussion - but this is the Open Chat section, and threads are not subject to the announced auto close timer here. But regardless, let’s keep the discussion going
Been a Linux user since '96 when I started with Red Hat. Never really intended to distrohop at all. …but needs change and opportunities too so hops do happen. The latest hop occurred because the distribution I normally use isn’t available for ARM-based hardware. I’m aiming to live off grid some day and thus must adapt to a life with very little energy. The only computers I’ve found with a low-enough power need are ARM-based. So I hopped from x86 to aarch64, but I still wanted to stay with the RPM packages (and commands). On top of running Linux on all my computers, stationary as well as laptops, I use a mobile with a full Linux operating system. Sailfish OS uses zypper, so openSUSE feels somewhat familiar in that sense.
My main computer is currently a Radxa Rock 5B with a Raspberry Pi 400 as the backup, believe it or not. Both run Tumbleweed but I aim to switch to Slowroll as soon as it becomes stable enough. My laptop is ARM-based too and runs an Arch derivate, although that is set to change in the near future.
Coming from fedora - tumbleweed felt just like a better system overall in everything
Been tinkering with Linux in one form or another since the mid 90’s… being a (relatively) poor enlisted sailor with an interest in computers but without the budget for Microsoft’s C/C++ that I was interested in at the time… a shipmate introduced me to the whole FreeBSD / GNU software scene. Did my time on Slackware, then Redhat, Debian… somewhere around SuSE 5.0 was where I got on that particular bandwagon. No more (or at least not as much) fighting with drivers for sound and printing! YaST seemed great - but I quickly found that trying to do some things ‘outside’ of YaST could lead to some ugly consequences. Back then my ‘home lab’ consisted of a (literal) stack of old PCs off e-Bay, and a dialup modem.
When the first Intel Macbooks came out, I went back to the Dark Side for a while. Most of my Linux computing since has been via VirtualBox, or on a small SBC like a Raspberry Pi or more recently a small form factor 1L micro PC (Dell 7040, Lenovo M920, etc.). I’ve been enjoying the heck out Proxmox for some virtualized home lab stuff, but decided it’d be nice to have an actual stand-alone PC (again, small form factor 1L) out in the shop. Some things it’s easier to look up / watch on an actual monitor (plus use as an additional SyncThing target)… and when it came time to decide what OS to put on there, openSuSE TW was pretty close to the top of the list!
Enough has changed over the years - my last ‘serious’ use of SuSE was somewhere in maybe the 9.x days? so while I’m not quite starting from scratch, it’s not far off either.
My story with Suse started long ago… as far as I remember that was in 2005-2006 with SuSE 10 (carefully burned on CDs ). I was a science student, with some opensource interests but formerly on Windows (ME/XP). I was replacing and using more and more my windows software with open alternatives as I was discovering this fantastic new world.
Curious about Linux but with no idea where to start … a friend told me about a german distro : SuSE. I test and ran it in dual boot with the Win’stuff but quickly fall in love with SuSe and got rid off Win’. 20 years after, I’m still here.
The learning curve was perfect and still is : from Win’ with opensource softwares, the change wasn’t too disorienting, GUI installing and managing was already possible out of the box but with a system allowing dive into CLI & entrails at our own pace.