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?
You find Zypper a better name than Pacman?
Yup I agree, openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma desktop is just awesome. my favourite distro at this moment,
I use openSUSE. Zypper is a PITA compared to pacman.
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…
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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.
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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…
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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.
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.
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?
🤦
“MY FAVORITE SPORTSBALL TEAM IS THE BEST!!!”
Can we just moderate these posts?
I would normally 100% agree with you. But if it’s an underrated distro, then I tend to be more lean on this. However, I agree that OP should have done a better job at ‘advertising’ openSUSE. For example; not mentioning YaST is just criminal.
Then JUST say that. You don’t need to be out here making insane and absolute statements.
I think I agree with the other commenter that you should just take a break.
Start a fanboy sub then? The noise ratio here is already way too loud.
I definitely hope that the noise ration will improve (by the amount of noise decreasing) over time. But, as it stands, the community is still relatively small. I get your grievances, but I honestly don’t know what the best set of directives would be.
So what should this community talk about then?
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.
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…
Anyone care to share their experiences with SUSE Enterprise Linux, or with the container focused OpenSUSE MicroOS? Looking to play around with it since it looks a lot more straightforward compared to RHEL (Red Hat looks great, just having trou_understanding their offerings as they have a ton) and hoped some folks knew a thing or two…
Yeah, that’s the first distro that I use in a long time (last time before that I was running some early version of Ubuntu MATE), and having a blast already. I also very like customizability of KDE Plasma 6.
