Hear me out, the mascot is a freaking chameleon, that’s cool as shit man.
Also it’s a German engineered distro, German engineering wins again!
Zypper is just a funnier name for a package manager and it has Tumbleweed which is arch but actually doesn’t break for once!
Your rebuttal?
openSUSE also remains one of the only distributions that have automatic Btrfs snapshots setup out of the box. I am very surprised other distributions have not done the same. Especially Fedora, since they use Btrfs already.
IIRC, it was related to Fedora Atomic. Out of the box, Fedora Atomic offers functionality that’s very close to what you’d expect from Btrfs snapshots. It doesn’t use Snapper, but instead relies on
(rpm-)ostree; at least, that’s my understanding of it. So, in order to make Fedora Atomic more palatable and attractive, this feature was not directly built into Fedora. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if ‘politics’ play a role in this; Snapper is kinda like openSUSE’s project. While Fedora Atomic’s implementation is Fedora’s take. Unfortunately, it happens to be (by design) not available on traditional Fedora.
You find Zypper a better name than Pacman?
I would say
zypper upis the better command, just because it’s kinda funny.pacmanis better overall, but it gets less fun when you start adding arguments like-Syu, if only because it’s a “language” you have to learn and isn’t self-documenting in any way.Haha,
zypper upis a nice one, didn’t know that.Pacman gets huge bonus points though for having a config option to turn to progress bar shown during package installation into a ‘pacman’ (letter c) chomping from left to right :)
(done by adding
ILoveCandyunder theMiscoptions in/etc/pacman.conf)
Zypper may be a better name than apt, but it doesn’t have super cow powers.
I think the issue with Suse is a lack of clear vision - SLE exists and it’s very good to have a competitor to Red Hat in my opinion. OpenSuse is a bit of everything: there’s Tumbleweed which’s selling point is to be rolling release and fulfilled the role Sid has for Debian: be the basis for the stable distribution. However, the stable distribution which was rebranded to Leap is now based on SLE (and will be based on ALP with version 16 if everything works out). So Tumbleweed is just rolling along as a downstream of Factory, which is… another rolling distribution serving as the main development distribution.
Then there’s also Micro OS, another rolling release distribution designed to host containers. Personally, I’d have found a minimal OS designed to be run in a VM - something similar to Alpine - more useful, but I’m not really a container guy. It’s also supposed to switch to ALP if I’m not mistaken.
Oh yeah and there’s also OpenEuler which is a free RHEL clone.
I wonder if all of this makes sense in some enterprise setups?
And then, last time I tried Tumbleweed (in fairness this was some years ago), after all this work with distributions tailored to specific cases, a build system with testing and so on, I run into a network configuration issue that couldn’t be solved with YaST. I didn’t know why they insist on keeping it, I guess at this point it’s such cost fallacy. Anyhow, try searching for how to solve it with Suse, answers are usually use YaST. Turns out Suse uses their own solution for networking, which is wicked (that’s not an adjective). This is started in 13.4.1.1 in https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-reference/cha-network.html. I don’t remember seeing the option in the terminal YaST. Zypper also wasn’t very convincing, coming from pacman.
All in all, from my point of view, they created a broad ecosystem that fills a lot of niches and yet just annoys me when I actually try to use it. In my opinion, their core tools are unremarkable at best.
YaST. I didn’t know why they insist on keeping it, I guess at this point it’s such cost fallacy.
What do you mean? I love the idea of a comprehensive central system config tool. I haven’t used OpenSuSE in ages but it always stood out to me as a huge plus.
It’s a nice idea when it works. But when it doesn’t cover your case, you need to edit configs manually and hope that YaST doesn’t decide to override them later. At least that’s what I remember.
Ah, I see, that’s unfortunate. That’s generally a real problem with tools that try to edit existing writable config files.
I really want to make a distro which is built on top of basically a GUI-first (at least for most general configuration) NixOS kinda thing, where you both have to go through the tool but it also doesn’t limit you in what you can do. That’s a huge endeavor though especially to get it right :^)
A good example of shitty YaST imo is the YaST sudo tool… Which doesn’t work unless you first manually edit the sudoer file to remove two lines that specifically says that they are default configurations and should be changed by the distro maintainers…
Tumbleweed does also feed into Leap. Leap uses SLE packages for most of the core libraries, but then user-facing applications see new versions integrated from what’s been packaged in Tumbleweed. Particularly, they also automate lots of the package testing in Tumbleweed, so that can be reused for Leap. Well, and also for SLE, which will also grab stuff from Tumbleweed when they do plan to upgrade their packages.
As for minimal VM images, they do offer downloads for those.
On this page, you can click on “Download”, then “Alternative Downloads”.
These don’t seem to be available for Leap currently. Not sure, if it’s because Leap 15.6 has only been out for a few weeks. Could also be that I’m missing something here.As for Wicked, they only use it for server systems as the default, and they do make it easy to switch to NetworkManager, if you prefer.
Yup I agree, openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma desktop is just awesome. my favourite distro at this moment,
My rebuttal is that I have never had arch not boot except me messing up the install 8 years ago when I was learning.
I installed a completely standard tubleweed install on a laptop, grub broke and tumbleweed wouldn’t boot anymore during the first update that was recommended to me through a notification popup that brought me to an update GUI. This was just 2 years ago.
Arch you can boot by default with rEFInd. It is infinitely easier than grub, searches and finds boots by default, even if it is configured incorrectly, and has never broken once in 8 years while grub has broken many, many times. That is not an option with tumbleweed install.
There have 100% been package and dependency breakages on tumbleweed, just like arch and every single distro. It happens.
Documentation is meager at best for tumbleweed and related. Archwiki is unbeatable in that regard.
The AUR. Please, try to go install niche programs like EdrawMax, PulseView, etc… RPMs make it pretty easy after you find it. On arch it is “yay pulseview” … “1” … “y” … Done.
They are all great distros with many pros and cons to each. Most people would be fine with any of them.
For example opensuse variants have btrfs with snapshot set up upon installation. That is pretty damn cool and useful!
That said, I am definitely going to try Kalpa because it is a fresh way of doing things.
To anyone still singing the “installation too hard” argument… Archinstall is so cool now… The defaults are just so friggin sane and systemd-boot with UKI as the boot setup is really cool to just be able to choose in an installer. The partitioner is also so easy to use… Most pleasant experience with a Linux installer in recent years. Yes, I’m talking about Arch.
All that said, I love Tumbleweed. They’re also working on providing systemd-boot and it was nice when I tried it. And the one thing that i haven’t seen anybody else implement in a comparable manner is Snapshots. Gotta love it.
Got to admit, the zypper argument is compelling.
“zypper up”! is the best upgrade command.
You’re forgetting that pacman can show a little pacman as the loading bar. Also I’m always happy to run updates so typing “yay” into my terminal just feels right.
Not a fan of the chameleon, but I do like the branding on the other versions, like MicroOS. Looks like runes or Unown pokemon.
Never tried it, but everyone I know who has tried it says its the most stable rolling release OS ever. That is pretty cool. Btrfs support is cool too, copy-on-write, deduplication, and whole-disk snapshot and rollback capability, its great for keeping your data safe.
I don't care about rolling releases, I get my stability from Debian, or sometimes Mint. If I want the latest software I’ll install Guix packages or FlatPaks. And I can still use Btrfs on Debian.
I used both tumbleweed and leap for a bit and they really are good. I’m actually using tumbleweed on a home server right now and it’s been a champ. But…
-
My biggest gripe is opensuse seems to use different package names than any of the other distros for basic packages. I had to install a package that used capitals in the package name, and coming from mostly debian based distros, that made me rationally angry when trying to find the package I needed. I think it was network-manager or something that’s usually installed by default and I wanted something familiar.
-
Online directions for setting something up usually has deb and/or fedora rpm directions, which is usually just some difference in package names and the equivalent install command, searching the base package will let you figure it out. I had very few issues following debian/Ubuntu directions and translating them for fedora. Opensuse is always non-existent so you always need to translate those directions for opensuse, which is usually like doing it for fedora until you run into point (1).
I agree that (1) is particularly painful on openSUSE, because of (2), and I do agree that Fedora tends to be more similar to Debian/Ubuntu, but package names differing between distros is pretty universal for any non-derivative distros.
For example, I tried to use
nix-shell, which basically lets you set up a small, reproducible build environment using packages from NixOS. And it was working excellently, except I could not figure out for the life of me, what the names of the NixOS packages are that provide certain C libraries…
-
I always find it interesting, when people claim they don’t like Arch, because it breaks, supposedly.
Out of genuine curiosity, what did you find, that kept breaking, that wasn’t user error, and wasn’t easily reparable?
I use openSUSE. Zypper is a PITA compared to pacman.
I think Tumbleweed is pretty great, Slowroll even better for people that just need a working Distro.
But Fedora Atomic Desktops win by far over OpenSUSEs “immutable” variants which are just pointless.
To me, it seems as if openSUSE Aeon is heading towards providing an even more stable rolling release distro experience than what people have come to expect from Tumbleweed. However, it seems as if lack of customization/tinkering -even more so than what we expect from other ‘immutable’ distros- will be the tradeoff. Personally, I regard the diversity in vision for these projects as a net positive; let’s see what sticks you know. The project is still relatively young, though.
Let’s see what the future will bring us.
The way they handle package updates and backports is one, and I suppose really good. I dont understand Fedoras versioning. One rolling, one semi-rolling, one more stable, that makes sense.
But the most important reason, for me, for image-based/ostree-based distros is the possibility to reset to have a bit-by-bit clone of the upstream configuration.
Normal distros just build up entropy, over time. Users do random shit and it just gets harder and harder for support to find issues. And in my own experience I just started to get weird issues I couldnt trace back.
This may have been because of KDE Plasma 5 which was often pretty messy. But on Kinoite I always knew it was because of this, as I can reset the system and reapply one by one the changes I did.
This is so awesome for administration too.
OpenSUSE does not handle this at all. They just use BTRFS snapshots so your system of reference is your previous one. If you want to resrt to 100% upstream, at least currently you cant.
You cant even see the changes you did to the system.
I asked them how to install Librewolf on there, where to add their repo. They to the end did not answer my question, but instead told me
- installing any RPMs is not supported
- but it is needed to install drivers etc.
This is complete nonsense, their system is just useless in such a state. And the people were so toxic, ignorant and childish, … yeah no.
I asked them “does your package manager support resetting the system” and other questions where the answer is no, they ignored them and kicked me out of the group.
I dont cry that nobody cares for their 2 semi-supported Distros lol. Fedora meanwhile is flourishing!
/rant end.
Thanks for the reply!
In general, I’d have to say I agree with your post:
- Reset option is indeed a necessity. Especially on ‘immutable’ distros. Because, why even bother otherwise?
- Their community seems less diverse compared to Fedora’s. Granted, I believe Fedora’s community is probably most diverse due to how (relatively speaking) popular it is in combination with its release cycle being (roughly) in the middle of what you’d get otherwise with Arch on one end and Debian on the other.
However, I’m hopeful of what they’ll cook for their ‘immutable’ spins.
Btw, FWIW, regarding the reset option, perhaps there’s reason to be optimistic regarding its future; here’s Richard Brown on the topic and here’s a page he refers to related to this.
Why the fuck does it ask for root password to change every little thing? Want to change network password? Root password. Install a flatpak? Root password. Sneeze? You guessed it, root password.
I’d be using it instead of Fedora if it wasn’t for that shit. I even tried to spin myself a custom OpenSuse ISO…
It might be a bit tighter than Fedora, I haven’t tried Fedora so I wouldn’t know but Flatpaks can still be installed as user, no pw. All mine are, by default.
But you still need to add the remote… With a root password of course. At least last time I tried.
Surely, you could add a --user remote without a problem?
Probably trough the commandline, it has been a long time since I last checked, but not using the gui, which asked for the password for any repository modification.
The default config for sudo is to ask for root password. I too was annoyed by this and had to change the setting to ask for the user password, not root, every time I used sudo.
I’ll concede that the logo is good but I found the package manager confusing. Also I like compiling packages from source so only a couple of distros allow me to fully dive into that. It’s Gentoo for me, I’m afraid.
I always was and will be team SUSE, no matter what. With other distros I had bad experiences at some point. Never with SLES or OpenSUSE. Although, currently I have no OpenSUSE installation, as it is not suitable for gaming.
What makes it unsuitable?
Oh, as with any Linux, all of them are for everything suitable if you have the time to modify everything. I‘d rather use a Linux which is optimized for gaming, e.g. uses Zen kernel, ProtonPlus, Steam with gamescope and gamemode, HDR enabled by default due to the correct DisplayPort drivers, and many other things.
In terms of frames per second, it is probably only slightly better than an unoptimized OpenSUSE
Zen Kernel is the opposite of “optimized for gaming”.
It was once the default kernel for out-of-the-box gaming simply because it had fsync patches integrated. But since fsync is in the normal kernel for quite some time now zen is obsolete for that purpose.
I mean it’s still an okay choice for any desktop environment but it is definitely not optimized for gaming as it sacrifices throughput and is more tailored to multitasking of a lot of smaller things running to provide a snappy desktop experience.
TIL … thank you very much for clearing that up, very much appreciated! :)
