I have been using Mint for about six months now and while I am not going to start distro hopping, I slowly want to start exploring the rest of Linux.
Originally I was looking at Arch based distros such as Manjaro and EndeavourOS, during which I found out Manjaro is somewhat pointless because you pretty much should not use the AUR on Manjaro or else you will break the system inevitably. EndeavourOS looked solid though.
However, I got a few suggestions regarding OpenSuSE Tumbleweed as a better alternative to Arch based distros and just wanted to know what are the pros and cons of OpenSuSE compared to Arch based distros from your experience?
I’m looking at switching the server base to OpenSuse Leap for the in-place upgrades. This is after over a decade of running RHEL clones.
I don’t have dependencies on anything RHEL specific, so the switch isn’t too bad.
The hardest part is FreeIPA which still isn’t in the repos, but that can live on CentOS since it’s easy enough to to setup a replica.
One thing I’ve found I dislike is how limited the installer is in partitioning disks. I like having multiple disks in my servers, and I can’t set them up in btrfs at install time like I want to.
Yeah, 3rd-party repos messing things up is a generic distro problem. Some repos are better about not conflicting then others. I’m planning on being pretty conservative with them when I finally switch a desktop to Tumbleweed.
Interesting, my only experience with installing openSUSE so far has been doing AutoYaST installs, and that seems to handle multi-disk BTRFS gallantly.
FreeIPA (the server part) has also been a bit of a friction point for me as well, but they have a containerized version which has been working rather well in my own usage so far, so having it as a direct system package is less important.
I haven’t tried an autoyast install. These have been one off installs for testing.
Are you creating a multi-disk volume?
I’m creating two different btrfs volumes on two separate disks. I have a SATA SSD for root and a faster NVMe SSD for applications, home dirs, or whatever. The installer won’t let me set mount points for the volume or subvolumes on the NVMe, and I have to do that later.
Ah, two entirely separate BTRFS volumes on the disks?
I’ve not actually done that myself, but the disk configuration XML definitely supports it.
Yeah. Two separate volumes on two different disks. Alright, I’ll have to check out autoyast.
The last thing for me would be ZFS support. 🫤 You haven’t happened to try that out have you?
Nope, I’m personally staying away from ZFS on Linux on any critical system (and I don’t really have enough personal hardware to have properly non-critical systems) until it has more proper support, don’t feel like being at the whim of out-of-kernel modules for such things.
Supposedly you can just install and use it though, it’s available in the filesystems repo at least.
ZFS being out of tree is annoying. I miss it when I’m not on FreeBSD.
It works well enough, especially with a stable kernel. Fedora and ZFS can be tricky with kernel upgrades, and I was wondering if Tumbleweed is the same. I figured ZFS and Leap would be similar to CentOS or Debian.
@jollyrogue @ace yeah. A spin of fedora that included ZFS in the kernel and kept it in line with upgrade without having to pin your kernel to avoid it breaking would be awesome.
Currently I’m on 6.4.14 I think and when dnf upgrade removes the ZFS module to install the latest 6.14 kernel I just install it again and it removes the 6.4 devel package installs like 6.2 devel and ZFS and the module still loads even on a 6.4 kernel. Go figure. Lucky I guess.
I’m pretty sure the problem is with the ZFS specfile. The ZFS rpm package should specify which kernels it requires, and dnf should figure things out.
According to the ticket below, a change related to this has been merged, so maybe the problem has been fixed. 🤷🏽♂️
https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/12124