Is there any reason NOT to use openSUSE Tumbleweed as a desktop OS?

sedot, 10 months ago

I started to use Tumbleweed three years ago and can’t complain much.

The only thing are patterns, because they bundle some software i dont use too – but i learned how i can avoid them.

Potatofish, 10 months ago

I see a lot of clueless interpretations of openSUSE in this thread. Like any other distro, you have to learn how it works. Most people here don’t want to bother and keep arguing that it doesn’t work like Arch, etc. Well, it’s not Arch… duh.

Of course, by now, you’ve realized that the defaults are good and it’s very stable. Unlike other rolling distros, it rarely breaks from an update because every release is automatically tested. BUT, issues do arise with the repo NVIDIA drivers, which don’t always get built fast enough to work with newer kernels as they are released. It’s not a big deal because you only need to wait ~1 week, but surprisingly, the maintainers don’t preemptively address it. Also, codecs can be problematic because, like the NVIDIA repo, they lag behind and take time to catch up to the OSS repo. Annoying, to be sure, but if you are using flatpaks, it doesn’t matter.

And this is probably a shocker to most people here, but you don’t have to install Yast. I don’t use it at all. The catch is that you must learn something new and how to hold back certain packages.

20gramsWrench, 10 months ago

you quickly feel like it’s not a distro for convenience but for enterprise productivity, yast is incredibly powerful and filled to the brim esoteric professionall options but little no no though for a casual experience, the repos don’t have much in the way of fun and are even software p*tent respecting meaning codecs and such need a separate config, the suse specific tools have their own theming , a lot of thing (like mounting luks volumes) require admin passwords… most of these can be remedied will a little tinkering but why bother when other distro are way simpler to tailor and already have a more comfortable experience out of the box

CrypticCoffee, 10 months ago

If you like to brag that you use Arch or Gentoo, or you like a rolling update to occasionally break your system Manjaro style do not use OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Otherwise, go ahead and enjoy. I’ve used for over a year without issue. It’s fantastic.

kabe, 10 months ago

Here are a few reasons I can think why some may not take to it. Trigger warning for Suse users

• Out-of-the-box aesthetics are pretty ugly (why are they still using that godawful default wallpaper?)
• Yast looks like the Windows 95 control panel (I guess this might be a plus for some people?)
• Zypper can be sluggish to update and install packages
• regular package updates are large, even compared to Arch
• Seems to have more frequent security/password prompts (a good thing for enterprise scenarios, but not always welcome or necessary on a personal PC)

It’s not bad by any means, but I’ve tried it out several times and always ended up abandoning it because of little niggles like the above.

KotoWhiskas, 10 months ago

Also it would sacrifice user experience over "security" - i.e. with default SElinux config proton may not work correctly - see this bug

Mane25, 10 months ago

Yast to me looks reassuringly old and sturdy.

kabe, 10 months ago

Yeah, I can see why that may appeal to some people. Personally, I prefer a more modern look.

Richardisaguy, 10 months ago

Software avaliability can be a bit scarce too, mainly when compared to fedora or even arch’s aur

huskypenguin, 10 months ago

I’m a video editor, I had a tough time getting Davinci Resolve to run. That’s my only complaint.

topnomi, 10 months ago

I've been using tumbleweed and really like it. Using it as my home server, but I sometimes login.

Jumped there from linuxmint, been liking it much better. So far I've had no issues with upgrades.

Mane25, 10 months ago

(I mentioned most of this in another thread recently.)

I couldn’t fully get on with TW when I tried it because of very large updates appearing at random, which is due to its rolling nature. The problem I had is I would see a massive load of new packages that I didn’t have time to install, and I would wonder “can I leave this for now or is one of those a critical patch?”. On Fedora, my distro of choice, it’s a no-brainer, I just do the upgrade every night and the big version update twice a year when I’m ready. On TW you have more of an entanglement of major feature updates and regular essential patches which are hard to separate out. I prefer the predictability of Fedora, and the release cycle gets the balance right of not having to wait too much to get the latest stuff.

Just to be clear though, overall I think OpenSUSE is a great distro, I’m being critical but it still probably would be my second choice.

Raphael, 10 months ago

lemmy.world/post/1177173

A7thStone, 10 months ago

That post is misleading. Novell cooperated with Microsoft, and actually made money from the deal not the other way around. That no longer matters anyway since the SUSE company is no longer connected to Novell. Novell was bought out by Attachmate who then merged with Micro Focus. Micro Focus sold SUSE to EQT who made SUSE it’s own company. So while the Novell deal was bad for open source it no longer has any bearing on opensuse.

vampatori, 10 months ago

I used it for about a year and it was good - I had some issues with some bits of my laptop hardware working out of the box, and I sometimes got into an error when doing an update due to mirror synchronization. If you use see an error similar to this, just give it a while before updating again:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">Downloaded data exceeded the expected filesize
</span>

In the end I moved away to match my server environment. Initially to Fedora (CentOS server) but then to Ubuntu (I was mid upgrading from C7 to C8 when Red Hat cut the C8 SLA and discontinued it, so I jumped ship). Both Fedora and Ubuntu are really solid and support absolutely every feature of all my hardware out of the box - I’ve come to really appreciate their stability now.

Sivaru, 10 months ago

It does not have the latest software. It’s my first beloved distro. then arch, now nixos.

woelkchen, 10 months ago

It does not have the latest software.

Then openQA tests fail.

Sivaru, 10 months ago

I don’t know, to be fair I didn’t used it for a long time, 3 years or more. several things may have changed.

CrypticCoffee, 10 months ago

It had modern kernel and software. It was the reason I use it. To support newer hardware. Thus was a year ago and I’ve been happy since. Maybe not Manjaro not master branch untested up to date, but as good as you’ll ever need.