I recently move to openSUSE from Ubuntu, because I simply felt a bit awkward with Canonical. Now you could say there is SUSE behind openSUSE as well, and the world is not perfect. That is true, but I really do not like the fact that Canonical would receive any of my data, as irrelevant as it might seem. I also rather happily pay for a product than unintentionally share data with a corporation. Now that said, Ubuntu is still a great OS and you can turn off telemetry and as a pragmatic computer user I have nothing against snaps.
Still there were some minor points that added to the aforementioned awkward feeling and made me switch: 1.) An annoying dysfunctional bluetooth connection to my headphones 2.) An extremely short battery life on my Thinkpad 3.) General performance felt not as good
Now coming to openSUSE. I knew the distro from years ago and thought I give it another try. And I was not disappointed. After some years of rudimentary Linux experience (mostly Ubuntu and Linux Mint) I can even appreciate openSUSE more than ever.
There are certainly a lot of soft facts that let you choose openSUSE:
- It is easy to install, still leaves you room to play around with stuff.
- It has a pretty stable KDE integration (which leads to a great DE experience)
- It has a good community behind it
- It is mostly based out of central europe (#dataprivacy)
- Rollbacks are just great and already saved my ass
I am not sure whether I would recommend it for newbies altogether, despite it being really stable, it still has the look and feel of a distro for an intermediary skillset. This is mostly because of the look and feel of the installer and YaST. Maybe it has to do with the fact that you certainly would need to use the console from time to time. But then again, at least Tumbleweed is advertised as such a distro. Hence, no one can really complain about these things.
I am using IntelliJ and Podman a lot, the experience under Ubuntu was a bit better, as it really just worked out of the box (with snaps). For openSUSE it took some tweaks so that everything works (out of Flatpaks). Might be an unfair comparison, but being productive easily is still a good measure. Using IntelliJ wo Flatpak was an annoyance, so therefore I have chosen the Flatpak path ;)
But putting in a little effort to make the IntelliJ stuff work was worth it since the overall performance is MUCH better. Of course it could be due to different DE, but it still just feels great to work on openSUSE. And indeed battery life is much, much better. I did not do any measurements, but I would say we are talking at least about 30% improvement (and yes I had TLP installed on Ubuntu).
Additionally, Bluetooth worked flawlessly (like everything else I was doing so far).
There was one little bug though with my background in the lock screen that somehow did magically change for a while.
Gaming with Steam also works easily, although you might need to change codecs for headphones in order to hear stuff. But I had a similar problem under Ubuntu.
As usual differences in distros sometimes are marginal, at least for the non-Linux nerd-faction, so for me its really the mixture of the philosophy behind, the performance, how easy I can do and understand things.
Overall, great experience with openSUSE. I can recommend. Would be great to hear responses to my experience.
Agreed on all points. I love openSUSE, but I don’t recommend it to beginners, not because it’s hard or anything (it’s really solid), but because it’s not popular enough for new users to be able to get help with a quick search.
I originally came to openSUSE after getting tired of yet another Arch breakage (usually Nvidia), and I really wanted to keep my server and desktop under one product family. So I tried Leap on my server, liked it, and then used Tumbleweed on my desktop. I had fewer failures with Nvidia, and when it broke, I could do a snapper rollback and retry the upgrade a couple days later.
I currently use:
- Leap - NAS & VPS
- Tumbleweed - desktop
- Aeon - laptop
I’m considering switching my servers to MicroOS, mostly because I want newer podman and everything is containerized anyway.
It’s nice having so many options, and I guess I want people to try something else so they can realize what’s so nice about openSUSE once they’re a bit more seasoned.
Please share your journey if you adventure yourself to switch your server to MicroOS. I’m curious about switching mine from Tumbleweed to MicroOS or Leap, but I’m still not a fan of Podman Quadlets tbh.
BTW, since you use Aeon in one laptop, do you use Distrobox? If so, has it affected your battery life? :)
I created a test VPS with MicroOS, so I have a little experience with it, but I haven’t put a ton of services on it. I have been slowly converting my docker conpose setup to podman compose on my Leap system in anticipation of switching to microos.
Here are my main complaints so far:
- SELinux changes happen on boot, which can be slow (several min on my Aeon laptop), and blocks boot
- distrobox (Aeon) doesn’t have access to everything, so managing systemd services and journal logs needs to happen outside of it; I’d prefer to not have to remember where I need to do something
- toolbox on MicroOS is kinda buggy/limited (shouldn’t need it much though)
- Steam flatpak is a bit wonky to launch, haven’t tried controllers yet
Battery life has been fine, and I’m not sure why distribox would matter? It’s just a podman container, not a VM or anything.
All in all, it’s pretty good I guess? I’m not quite sure if Distrobox is good enough to replace my normal tumbleweed setup on my main Dev machine, but we’ll see.
Interesting, you say “It has a great community behind it”, could you elaborate a bit on that? For a while I’ve been trying to understand it. For example, do they have a documentation team? The matrix channel was empty of content last time I checked. Why is Yast being deprecated? Who decides these things and where? Who will decide which name will replace “OpenSuse”, the board? Things like this. In debian there’s votes and discussions, but OpenSuse describe themselves as a do-ocracy, does that mean I can just decide on a name, in a doing spirit, or who actually decide things, is it suse the company?
As ususal, many things that people say when it comes to distros are somewhat anecdotal. I am no different here and I would love to back up my claim with some empirical data. But I am left with simply having a good impressions of forum discussions and from discussions at conferences (that I watched on video).
You are actually asking interesting questions about openSUSE, imho good questions to ask about any distro. Fortunately, in case of openSUSE it seems to me that there are answers available.
For me its clear, that SUSE is very involved behind the scenes, simply because a lot of employees also work on openSUSE. But that is not a bad thing (#Ubuntu # Canonical).
But in general, have a look here: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board
It says e.g.
The board should provide guidance and support existing governance structures, but shouldn’t direct or control development, since community mechanisms exist to accomplish the goals of the project
and
The board members are elected by the community and the chair person is appointed by SUSE.
Hence, I have the feeling they are being fairly open about the involvement of SUSE and their structure in general. Also they claim to have community mechanisms to guide development. I can not judge on those, as it would require some more digging, but I would assume they are intact and functioning as openSUSE is progressing in its development.
Hope this helps you.
