So I haven’t done any distro hopping for a long time. I’ve settled on Arch Linux as my daily driver some 7-8 years ago and despite it feeling a little overwhelming at times, I quite enjoyed the challenges it provides as opportunities to learn more about how computers work. I’m in no way a professional IT guy, just interested in the subject and use my computer for pretty mundane taskst, such as office work, internet browsing, media consumption, a bit of gaming and photo editing.
I liked the way Arch lets you pick your own destiny and I can pick which software I like best on each level, from boot loader, to display manager to desktop environment. I use KDE plasma, for example, but don’t like their default text-editor very much, so I don’t have to install it and can just use gedit instead.
I’m happy with my main machine running Arch, but I have two other machines that I don’t use very regularly, and maintaining those in Arch, even running the regular rolling release updates is impractical, so I decided to switch them to a different distro. One is an old laptop, that I use in a different room for my Online Pen&Paper Sessions, the other is an abomination of spare parts, at my parents house, (I call it Frankenstein’s PC, with an old AMD Athlon CPU and 4 Gigs of RAM), that I only use on occasional visits, if I have to absolutely do something that is too annoying to do on my phone.
Would openSUSE Leap be a good pick for these use cases? What advantages does it have to offer? What do you think I will enjoy or find annoying, coming from Arch?
I’d be happy to read about your experiences, opinions and suggestions.
Here’s what I personally liked moving from Arch to OpenSUSE:
- OOTB snapshots with BtrFS
- Easier maintenance (this is just true of every distro with a fixed release cycle)
- Zypper is just plain better than Pacman
- 1-click installs with OBS
People also seem to love YaST but I personally loathe it.
Now for the shit I found annoying.
The way OpenSUSE handles proprietary codecs. They’re on a separate repo that sometimes gets out of sync with the regular repo so you’ll try to update and it’ll pester you about changing the source from which ffmpeg is installed because the official repos have a newer version. This is much milder on Leap than on Tumbleweed.
The patterns. Oh my God, the patterns. Unlike Arch, OpenSUSE aims to provide an apple-esque “just works” experience out of the box. This means that when you tell zypper to install “Plasma”, you don’t just get a bunch of packages from a list called “Plasma” — you get Plasma, a desktop environment. Sure, you can uninstall KMines, but it will come back next update. After all, you didn’t install a compositor, a window manager, a panel and a minesweeper clone; you installed Plasma. And KMines is part of Plasma. In theory, you can uninstall the metapackage for the pattern and that’ll stop its dependencies from coming back; in practice, every single package on a new install is installed through a pattern so removing them one by one will get really annoying really fast.
Finally, it’s set to install recommended packages by default so you’ll uninstall the metapackage for the pattern and think you finally got rid of KMines just to update your system, open your menu and find it there because some other package recommends it. You might think there’s a config to disable this, and you’d be right, but then you’ll update and find yourself with no WiFi because someone decided to split NetworkManager and NetworkManager-wifi into different packages and set the latter as recommended for the former.
In any case, I can think of few things worse than maintaining Arch (or pretty much any rolling release) on computers you don’t use daily so give it a shot.
Disclaimer: I haven’t used OpenSUSE in about 2 years so some (all?) of my information might be outdated. Apparently YaST is no more. Good. Fucking. Riddance.
Thank you very much for that detailed and very helpful first-hand experience report.
It sounds like your annoyances might bug me too at some point. But I probably won’t mind them as much on those secondary machines (and I don’t hate Kmines as passionately 😉)
Yast is great for on boarding, after you start learning CLI then CLI can be quicker. But for example YAST security module shows you if you are locked down or need to deal with some hardening; super user friendly for new comers
Never used Arch but openSUSE does have a minimal install option you might like. Other than that I find it to be a pretty no-nonsense distro. Most distros have some kind of ideology, like Ubuntu is easy, Arch is minimal, etc. openSUSE is just middle of the road and doesn’t push you in any direction.
It feels pretty German out of the box but you can obviously change whatever you want. BTRFS means if anything fucks up you can just roll it back but I’ve never had to in the two years I’ve been running it. If you’re used to Arch you might find that Leap is a little slow but Tumbleweed and Slowroll both want updating constantly. I like Zypper too, it’s fast and straightforward.
That sounds pretty good.
I’m looking at Leap, specifically since I don’t want to have to update constantly, and don’t mind a bit older software for those machines. I just want something that’s easy to maintain and somewhat ready to use, even if I haven’t touched it for a few months, and Arch just tends to break if you don’t update regularly.
The only thing I need up-to-date is a browser and Discord, which I’ll probably install via its own flatpak anyways.
It feels pretty German out of the box
I am German myself, and I’m not sure how I have to take this. 😅 Out of my mouth this could be both a compliment and an insult, depending on context.
I can recommend Aeon for experienced users
A first look at their wiki makes it seem tempting. Low maintenance is exactly what I’m looking for, however I have zero experience with immutable systems (and I’m not even sure I completely understand what that means). Do you have any experience how well that works when using some proprietary software. For one of my use-cases Discord is (unfortunately) a hard requirement.
You probably won’t feel any difference to a traditional opensuse installation. There are here and there differences but nothing end user facing. You’ll install everything via flatpak and if you need specialized software you use distrobox. You can even use an arch distrobox if you still want to use the aur. The main differences is the choice of default software and settings compared to your experience with arch
You might want OpenSUSE Tumbleweed rather than Leap. I was on Leap for 7 years, but the new version 16 seems to have dropped a bunch of default installs and some YAST2 GUI stuff was dropped in favor of cockpit, but cockpit isn’t installed by default and had permission issues to get running OOTB. Just seems like a mess on 16,whereas 15.x and back were perfection.
Tumbleweed is rolling, however OpenSUSE has automated testing of their builds so I have yet to have any issues happen. It is highly “stable”. And if it did break you just reboot and choose a previous snapshot and you are back up and running in one minute
As a former Arch user that has been (and still is) using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for like… 9 months? I would summarize it like this: DON’T SWITCH.
At first everything will feel pretty good. Latest software like Arch, but with the BTRFS config OOTB, which feels like “wooow, this is really cool”.
But then… You’ll slowly start seeing the problems.
Some other comment said
zypperwas better thanpacman. That’s absolutely not true.zypperis way slower, and search works horribly. Even with the new parallelization system, things are definitely worse.Also, the
paru/yayequivalent experience (non-official packages) is bad, really bad, not only because of how little software actually is there, but also because things are not as well mantained, and stuff like codecs will make you cry.And for the stability of Tumbleweed… My system, and several apps have been broken too many times in these months of usage, and stayed broken for weeks without a fix. It’s not like Arch didn’t break on me. But not this frequently, and not without quick fixes.
Yeah, that snapshots system is not something exclusive to OpenSUSE. Fedora does it too. And it’s not like you can’t configure it in 15 minutes with the Arch wiki.
I’ve been using Tumbleweed for almost a year now, and have had a great experience! Zypper is fine; cnf is a helpful utility that things like Debian / Fedora could certainly use (I know they have ways of searching too, but cnf is so simple).
OPI has everything I’ve needed for 3rd party apps, so no complaints there.
When I first installed Tumbleweed it was on an HP Elitebook, which gave me some grief with audio before I figured out a workaround, but after installing it on an X1 Carbon I can’t imagine using anything else for the foreseeable future. (It’s still installed on the Elitebook, I just never power it on any longer).
All this to say, your experience hasn’t been great for you but for me it’s been fantastic. I run Debian on the self-hosted servers I run, but on my main machine Tumbleweed has been fantastic for me. I don’t even use or like YaST :D
I find your comment is a bit off-putting as well - how would you respond if I said ‘NEVER USE ARCH’? My take is - tell people about your experiences, and let them decide for themselves. Why are you still using Tumbleweed if you’re ‘so against it’?
In my opinion, Zypper offers better dependency resolution than Pacman. I have been an Arch user, and the system is good if you do not install random scripts from AUR. It is curious how in Linux we believe that it is more secure than other systems, but then we install random scripts from AUR on a system that, in the case of Arch, is complicated to maintain the enhanced security of SELinux, for example.
Add a network share, mount /var/cache/pacman on each Arch machine. Download once, install many.
I don’t know if that would be practical. I’m not aiming to clone my system. Those machines have vastly different hardware capabilities and use-cases. Also I know much too little about networking at all and one of those machines (the Frankenstein’s Computer) is in a completely different household, so i’d have to sync it over the internet.
But maybe you can elaborate a bit and explain why that might work well for me.
All it does is share the package cache across all the systems.
Any time any Arch system goes to install a package, it checks if that package is already in the cache before downloading a new one.At home, I’ve got several Arch systems across bare metal and virtual machines, and they all share a cache.
The first one to update the kernel takes a couple minutes to download the package. The second through ninth systems take zero seconds to download that package.As for different needs, you’re right in that the overlap isn’t going to be perfect, systems with unique purposes will need to download each non-overlapping package. But the overlap is substantial. The kernel, the base system, ssh, python, all the standard utilities, there’s no reason to redownload all of that.
Since yours are in different households, though, there will be even less benefit there.
Instead, I’d recommend Ansible’s community.general.pacman (or some combination)
Thanks for the elaboration. I think I get it now, but yeah, the benefits would be limited.
Gotta take a look at Ansible. I’ve never used it before.
Ansible’s essentially just python scripts and ssh, and you define actions in a yaml file, and then say “run these actions on all of these hosts” with options for running them one after the other.
A huge part of the utility is that many things have been abstracted, so you can have an “update, reboot, and then confirm” playbook and run it across Windows, RedHat, AIX, Debian, Arch, UNIX, PiOS, etc, systems, and expect it to work (along with handy features like a retry file, logging, fact caching, conditional instructions based on states, and lots more).
After thinking about your case some more, I don’t think this would add too much more than some ssh commands in a bash script triggered by a cron job.
But it would be fun!
I use Tumbleweed because as soon as you install the system, it offers these features.
🛡 openQA-tested updates — every snapshot is tested before release. 🔁 Btrfs+Snapper — full system snapshots & instant rollbacks. 🔒 Secure by default — SELinux, AppArmor, hardened setup. 🧠 Consistent packaging — no random AUR scripts.
Run. They will consume you and you won’t be able to be free from the SUSE virus again. Run now or regret forever
Maybe I’d like to be consumed, if they sweeten the pot enough for me. 👉👈
Baseless rambling? Check.
