I have been testing Opensuse versions for several days now. I am coming from Debian but would like some more up to date packages and also easy full disk encryption and SELinux support.
At the moment I doing the test on my personnal computer but I work on Debian at my office (I am the only one) and try to introduce Linux for new incommers.
So I apreciated this two features SEL and FDE. I apreciated the ergonomy of all opensuse versions either with YAST or Cockpit.
But I am encountering bugs:
-Installer of leap needed the “nomodeset” settings
-Installing my Optimus GPU system is bugged Nvidia driver cannot be installed: error when downloading - #13 by Anonymous23. I lost two days for that and it is still not working.
-In opposite to Tumbleweed, the Leap FDE is asking two times the password. Its easy to solve but I take a bit time.
It may seems to be small probems, but I have few time to do these tests.
I was thinking to use Fedora, did a trial and everything worked after one hour. but I want to reduce dependency to US technologies due to geopolitical reasons. So I will try a bit more but am not sure to succed.
Anyway I also apreciated the friendly atmosphere of the forum.
The system also cannot go out from sleep (it wass already at the beginning) and I am unable to switch the screen to the external screen connected to the DELL dock station
Here’s the thing about using Linux - if you run into issues, deciding to jump to another distro means that when you run into issues there, are you going to change again to something else?
We try to be a friendly and helpful community - sometimes it takes time to solve issues because many times the issues are complex and more information is needed than the person with the problem provides. No shame in that, but patience is an important trait in learning and adapting to a new system.
Glad to hear you got your current issue sorted - and welcome!
Patience is not my biggest quality but I try to learn it
I change from Debian to Opensuse because I think that Opensuse is maybe a bit more user friendly with cockpit and a bit safer with full disk encryption and SEL and have a bit more up to date packages. Of course there is bugs in any distribution.
Well I am quite patient with bugs for my own use, but I need a rock solid system for work since I have few time to loose and I would like to propose the use of Linux to new incommers at my work which also have to work efficiently.
When I switch from windows to Debian I used two weeks of holidays to prepare my computer. I know this time was necessary and it was interesting but it was a bit painfull.
For a business use case where you need support, you might take a look at purchasing SUSE Linux Enterprise - there’s a desktop edition/pack (I forget how they package it now), and it comes with paid support with guaranteed response times.
That said, I use Tumbleweed and am running my own business.
Everyone who helps here is a volunteer - and you will likely find that to be the case in any non-commercial Linux distribution. That’s the tradeoff of using a “best effort, community supported distribution” as opposed to one that provides commercial support at a cost.
The biggest thing I’d suggest is to learn about how to use rollback - that way if an update causes you an issue, you can roll back to the previous packages in order to continue doing your work, and then find a time when you can take more time to troubleshoot the issue you ran into. To do this, you need to have installed using btrfs (not necessary for the home partition, but for some of the system areas it is essential).
I just wanted to address this bit, although it really is up to you how deep into a rabbit hole you want to go.
There are a lot of systems that OpenSuse uses that are upstreamed from Red Hat. Cockpit, Systemd, pipewire to name a few.
In the open source world especially there is a lot of cross-pollination.
This doesn’t mean that Red Hat calls the shots for OpenSuse, but a lot of development on the technologies that OpenSuse uses has sizeable Red Hat contributions.
Kernel contributions to for your hardware are also likely to come from US companies such as AMD, Nvidia, Intel and so on.
You are not under direct influence from those companies and they can’t syphon your data via OpenSuse (and neither does Fedora to be fair). So it isn’t the same as using Windows or MacOS, or software directly sold by US companies, but full independence from US companies is practically impossible to achieve.
That said, at the moment you can achieve enough independence via using most Linux distros in a way that you are not impacted in real world terms by US corporations.
As to the comment someone else made about distro hopping, I think it’s a bit of a personal choice there. Distros are starting points and for some people certain starting points are better than others. Availability of packages and community ethos are also different from distro to distro. I personally also learned a lot from hopping and I learned how to troubleshoot things because a distro had something my distro didn’t have, and I didn’t know it was possible until I saw it elsewhere.
It is very easy though fall victim of FOMO and never stop hopping.
Computing dependency on US technologies is a fact of life –
Current computing uses machines which have mostly evolved from machine architecture designed by the staff of US American universities – despite the influence of work done by the staff of various European universities in this area of research.
UNIX® was developed by members of the Bell Labs staff.
Like it or not, Linux is a UNIX® derivative.
And, the programming languages “C” and “C++” are both the result of work done by Bell Labs staff.
Yes, yes, Alan Turing, Edsger W. Dijkstra, Niklaus E. Wirth and Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, are all Europeans who had massive influence on computing as such but, an awful amount of what we use, at the very least in hardware terms, is US American technology.
The Linux Kernel is the result of the work of a Finnish citizen and, the LibreOffice Foundation is a registered German club and, the predecessor of LibreOffice – Star Office – was developed by a German company.
But, regardless of much we enjoy pointing out that, other nations have influenced computing in one way or another, a large portion of the technology we use is produced by US American companies.
Of course I recognize the work done by US companies and universities.
I perfectly know its is impossible to be completely independent from US technologies.
But anyway a bit less dependent is already a bit better, especially since last US elections.
We should also think about what happens if we do not have acces to these technologies anymore.
[…] and Members are expected to abide by that guidance. In recognition of the diversity of backgrounds of the Members and in the interests of community harmony, religious or political comment is not allowed.
… end quote
I retired in 2018 from a research lab where we had a constant flow of new users including visitors, post docs, and work-study students. For students and visitors I recommended asking around at their home institutions to see what distros were being used. There are some issues new users encounter that are nearly impossible to troubleshoot in user forums but can be solved easily by someone with access to the system.
RHEL was the “enterprise standard” at my former work, but we had a large mission-critical application that used a Java GUi with heavy lifting done by command-line tools developed on SGI IRIX64 and ported to RHEL. Since retiring I’ve been using Fedora, but staff reductions and high profile departures raise concerns over the future of Fedora.
