So long story short, I have been proudly part of this community since 2015 after experimenting with many distros and I have contributed little here and there as hobby and since I took up a job as a software engineer, I effectively spend enough time on a keyboard at work to contribute, and while I still have Tumbleweed on my personal computers, I’m restricted to Ubuntu/Debian for native linux at work (but WSL2 OpenSUSE TW).
If I were to say the number of things that I love about SUSE while comparing to Ubuntu for example:
Community, absolutely the community. We have a good bunch of people who are spending their valuable time out of their life to help in full disclosure to get the things working. In addition, when a serious bug is found, a patch is rolled out before I shut down the computer (given that I report in the morning).
For reference, I despise Ubuntu community because of:
Too many “hipster” drive by’s, meaning bunch of people who can barely scratch a keyboard tries to “contribute” by trying to mention irrelevant things. Not that I have too much against them, but they are trying to help but they seem to love typing but not reading.
Too many bugs swept under the carpet, something as fundamental as installer bug that re-writes the first EFI partition it finds in the installation drive instead of targeted partition is still there in the 22.04.3 LTS!
The boot loader. I love doing everything in console but boot time is where I don’t want to fudge it and it’s super nice to just boot from a rescue SUSE and let the boot-loader fix whatever mess I made.
Network manager. Love the UI, there was a time wicked was defaulted in LEAP and that was a bit atrocious…
I used to also enjoy the stability but somewhere in the LEAP… TW became more stable… but anyways the community alone and the useful references I can search whenever I need to do X, Y is more than enough for me to prefer OpenSUSE whenever I can.
I’ve probably been using S.uS.E, SLE and openSUSE too long circa 2005…
Never worried about other distributions, well maybe Solaris (SPARC and x86_64). Hardware support, everything I throw at it seems to work for me, have had to tweak a few kernel modules at times, I have RPi3’s, desktops and laptops all running and doing what is needed so never seen a need to digress.
I used SUSE 6.x in 1998 in dual boot with red hat. After a long absence in Linux, the first distro installed in VM, 13 months ago, was openSUSE. Followed by Fedora. I have tried many apt and rpm distros. The only ones that really interest me are openSUSE. In an old laptop I have a dual boot slowroll and leap 15.6. In vm I abandoned Fedora and have an installation of Linux Mint 21.3 XFCE as well as various openSUSE.
New user here .
Started experimenting with openSUSE Tumbleweed (TW) in Jan '24 on my secondary machine, switched primary to TW in Feb, had a few rough spots being at the bleeding edge of Linux so decided to move to Slowroll (SR).
Been happy with SR for the last few months. Smooth upgrades, cool new features, and a stable system make me a very happy user
I first tried SUSE around 2000. Another distro I tried that time was Mandrake. Then I tried it again around 2015. But didn’t use it primarily both times.
Now I have openSUSE Leap (Xfce) since 2020 as my main system and primary use. I also tried Tumbleweed and Slowroll. I especially like Slowroll and hope it keeps maintained.
This is the first time reading about SR, okay awesome. Is LEAP in her coffin now? Honestly the whole version control was a nightmare from OpenSUSE 13.2 → LEAP 42.1 was a disaster and a half then LEAP 15 an 15.1… 15.2 got me through half of my PhD then switched to TW which shipped with a broken emacs which was promptly fixed.
I think TW is the closest I can get to Arch without spending days on fixing minor things. Gentoo and Arch are just unmaintainable if one has a full time job. TW and I guess now SR is just what I think is future of OSes dhould look like.
OpenSUSE Leap is great because of package availability.
When something is not available in official repos, you go to OBS.
When something is not available in OBS, you can download the package from Fedora, Mageia and OpenMandriva repos.
Even if some package you need is not available in those repos, as long as it’s distributed as an RPM, you’re good to go.
The reason why I single out Leap is because Tumbleweed’s base changes everyday, so third-party packages can break after a while. I remember having to delete GPUCache folders after every update, or else Chromium/Electron apps would either crash or turn completely white.
Another reason why Leap is great is because of the whole xz fiasco, which only affected Tumbleweed users.
I like OpenSuse and have used it on and off since before Novell bought. I use tumbleweed now and have found it to be excellent. I have it installed on my laptop Lenovo Thinkpad t-450 not newest but work well. I’ve distro hopped for many years and seem to always end up back on OpenSuSE of one flavor or another. Thanks to all who make it possible.
Yep, it’s pretty awesome but as of now packages are held back by a certain amount of days which allows you to prepare for known bugs/issues but packages with some issues (including kernel) are not held back until the issue is fixed. So it doesn’t offer Leap level of stability. This is one area where I hope they improve on, for example Fedora’s custom 6.5 kernel they shipped with the recent Fedora 40 included a lot of fixes/reverts for known issues. While I wouldn’t want packages to be held back for 6 months I would not mind 2-3 months for critical issues to be fixed/reverted upstream.
Atomic flavors with read-only root filesystems appear to be the direction everyone is heading in. Fedora with their atomic flavors, openSUSE with MicroOS and Aeon/Kalpa, et al.
I was low-key hoping for ALP to make its big splash after 15.6 beta, didn’t know they had 15.7 planned already.
The community, a lot of system features and the best integration with btrfs and full disk encryption using sd-boot, software avalability using repos and obs, the best rolling release.
I like KDE plasma and I like having a home folder and trash icon on the Desktop. This is intuitive because it’s just like Windows and MacOS. For some reason the trash icon doesn’t work in Fedora; it disappears when the trash is emptied. I guess OpenSUSE Tumbleweed also has this bug: [KDE Trash icon disappears after emptying the bin]
I’m using OpenSUSE Slowroll, though, and for some reason the trash still works. The only conclusion I can reach is that the OpenSUSE Slowroll QA process is somehow preventing introduction of this bug. What do you think?
First linux experiences were Slackware and S.u.S.E. 5.4 in 1998 . The latter made me buy 6.4 and even though I multi-booted with other distros, S.u.S.E. was the best for me. Never left. Around openSUSE 13.1 I started running Factory and when Greg KH announced Tumbleweed I moved to it immediately. And it’s still my distro for anything.
I also have to mention that I’ve met so many good people in the community - some of them became real friends - that mentored me whenever I needed. Still happy to be a Geeko
I only in the past 2 years moved over to Fedora and plasma from more minimal environments on debian derivatives and arch. Before that, I was never a fan of rpm based distros. I still really like Fedora but on various VMs and on desktops had a few bad experiences. Some of that was corruption issues with ext4. Matt (linux cast) wouldn’t shut up about Tumbleweed and btrfs so I gave it a try and compared services and cpu overhead on my old haswell PC vs fedora and noticed some niggling issues weren’t there.
Zypper dup still hasn’t really broken anything for me outside of expected trivial home config files with the plasma 6 move. I’m still pretty unfamiliar with Opensuse tools… havent really touched yast or obs. Just repos, cli and a little sprinkling of flatpak and github but nothing has broken so far unless I was the one to break it and that’s a nice change of pace.
If there is something I am still not actively using is BTRFS, it gave me a pretty bad taste when I only had 128GB boot drive, shared by Windows 10 and /efi and / on it without knowing that BTRFS became default in LEAP 15, getting boot errors due to full root partition.
I found out that some people are even using it for RAID6+ maybe I may give it another shot. There was not one case when snapshot saved my a$$ but I hear it has saved many. I still swear by ext4.
New OpenSUSE (Tumbleweed) user here. Came here after using Arch for around 3 years. I love Arch, it’s one of the best distros I’ve ever used. One slight problem though: after 3 years, I started getting bored of the manual intervention required to do once or twice every month. I wanted something that I can install and forget about, but I also wanted to keep using a rolling release distro. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed seemed like it fits my needs.
There’s some things I don’t like about it, but overall I’m having a good experience. Also I much prefer this community to Arch’s, but I’m sure everyone here already knows about that so I don’t need to talk about it lol.
Nothing major, just some things I found a bit annoying:
I don’t like that I have to use a third party repository to get full codecs support, and how sometimes when I try to update my system, zypper complains because the Packman repo haven’t updated the new packages yet. It’s not a big deal to just wait until the Packman repo gets updated, but it’s still a little annoying.
Zypper is really slow for me. From what I’ve noticed, most people in Europe (especially in or around Germany) are fine with zypper, but most people not from that region (like me) have problems with how slow it is. I’ve tried different mirrors, but it’s the same.
Having to block patterns and packages in YaST to stop zypper from installing them again is annoying. I was surprised one time when I was updating my system and saw the message “7 new patterns will be installed” when I did not check them during installation.
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and btrfs so I gave it a try and compared services and cpu overhead on my old haswell PC vs fedora and noticed some niggling issues weren’t there.