This isn’t truly goodbye: I still love openSUSE and am very happy with the nearly 10 years in which I’ve been a constant user! I’ll definitely keep an eye on what changes with this OS, while my experience with it remains a great lesson in Linux.
That being said, I can announce that for the first time since I’ve become a Linux user a decade ago, I’ve moved away from openSUSE Tumbleweed to Manjaro. While openSUSE remains my second favorite and a very user friendly distribution, I consider that Manjaro has taken the lead over SUSE in most areas. There are a few reasons why I feel this is the case and why I decided to make the switch… I shall list the most important ones in case any point here helps with further improving openSUSE.
- There’s been a lot of debate over which packaging system is best. While rpm never let me down and I never experienced corruption or other major issues, I do believe it’s growing rusty and out of fashion compared to other package management systems. One thing I can now say from experience is that pkg appears to be faster than rpm: While “sudo zypper dup” would often take minutes if not hours, “sudo pacman -Syu” seems to find ways to move notably quicker. One reason might be the dynamic mirror management, which allows users to get their updates from the closest and fastest server instead of a fixed default location (download.opensuse.org). The only thing I miss is the ability to add custom repositories via URL which initially made Manjaro feel like a deal breaker: I later changed my feelings on this too, realizing that in a system where software must be compiled against precise libraries to work the ability to install stuff from random servers maintained by different people is more likely to propagate a dependency nightmare. Now for the first time I no longer need to make decisions about which package to switch to which repository based on which dependencies broke or became available.
- Speaking of packages: At least when it comes to the Tumbleweed version, I felt the package maintainers have become a bit sloppy as of recent. I recently dealt with software in core repositories having broken dependencies which could stick for weeks before being resolved. A recent example is the game 0ad which broke for over a month until its package was patched, which coincidentally made it difficult to play it with a friend I was introducing the game to. I can only speak for myself here, but even as a lover of the rolling release model I prefer waiting just a bit longer for an upgrade if that helps prevent breakage for all software in the official repos. Manjaro managed a wonderful balance in this regard, being fully based on a rolling release model but with a 2 week testing period for the stable branch, while users who feel adventurous or wish to help are able to get the latest stuff immediately.
- Manjaro offers some nice builtin tools I really like, in spite of how much I’m going to miss YaST. The most famous is its Kernel manager: You can install and remove any kernel version you like from a GUI integrated in the system settings panel, after which the grub bootloader is rebuilt and your kernel is ready to boot into! openSUSE has a good kernel management system too, with the kernel being updated automatically but a given number of kernels being stored in memory before being pruned… this always worked out for me but it doesn’t offer the same control. The same Manjaro toolkit automatically detects your drivers and lets you switch between open-source and proprietary ones which can be handy! Yet another part designed in this fashion lets you add or remove language packages for various applications you have installed.
- One thing I greatly disliked with openSUSE and some other distributions is that basic media formats aren’t installed by default due to patent issues; Even today openSUSE users who want support for mp3 / mp4 / mpeg (which I assume includes 99% of desktop users) have to add the Packman repository and install those formats separately. You only need to do this once after which they update together with everything else, though sometimes updates lag behind and cause annoyances in the dependency chain. Still those separate codecs are an idea that never sat well with me… especially when you have to maintain an important dependency like Packman which occasionally breaks its mirrors, for example http://packman.inode.at still isn’t back after months since it went down. I know this isn’t a fault of openSUSE as the team fears potential legal risks implied by absurd patent laws limiting commonplace software (which should be immediately abolished). None the less a lot of distributions like Manjaro managed to get around this problem and ignore those alleged patents, making users feel safer knowing they have basic music / video formats working out of the box.
- Lastly Manjaro appears to be a bit more lightweight than openSUSE. Not by much but I’ve seen some differences I like: The default installation reaches around 20 GB for the root partition, whereas for openSUSE I remember having more than 40 GB of the root partition used without installing many packages I haven’t added back in Manjaro (like games or LibreOffice). More importantly Manjaro seems to be lighter on RAM usage, with my used system memory capping out at some 500 MB / 1 GB less than it did on openSUSE on average. Startup / shutdown times and application response isn’t noticeably different, though if I try hard to feel a change I get the impression Manjaro is just a tiny bit snappier.