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?

  • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de
    4·
    1 year ago

    All comments here say the same - that TW is great. And they’re right! But I want to give you a few contrapoints to all of them and why I don’t use it.

    If you like rolling release distros, TW is the best.

    The OpenQA checks for incompatibilities in all the packages, and if something goes wrong or doesn’t work as it should, snapper rollback saves your butt.

    It’s a very very solid distro and I have great respect for the engineer-software-artists!

    Here’s what I personally didn’t like (my own opinion/ experience):

    • Zypper is pretty redundant for me, since the settings apps can do more nowadays. Still a handy tool
    • Zypper is slow
    • Huge updates. I don’t have a good internet connection and it takes ages to complete. And when it’s done, you refresh and there are already 5 petabytes more to download :D
    • More bugs: sometimes, it feels like a testing ground for new software. There were never any breaking errors, but many papercuts. I prefer to wait a few weeks until those are ironed out.
    • The installer sucks. I had to retry it many times until I got a system that I could work with.
    • Doesn’t seem as polished sometimes. There are a few QOL things I just miss by default, like a friendly password promt box for your LUKS.
    • Software availability: you have to use Flatpak more often

    I personally recommend and love Fedora. It’s also very up-to-date, but not as bleeding edge as TW. It feels more polished and robust, and it has a bigger community with more support.

    I started using Silverblue recently and I think I found my perfect distro! Maybe take a look into SB, it is really not as complicated or restricting as many people think.

    • not_amm@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      I think you meant YaST at the first bullet point. And yes, Zypper is slow.

      Still, I think that the updates and bugs are part of the bleeding edge rolling-release cycle, not a problem of only TW.