First, let me be clear up front that I’m not promoting the idea that there should be one “universal” Linux distro. With all the various distros out there for consumers, there’s lots of discussion about Arch, Debian, and Fedora (and their various descendant projects), but I rarely see much talk about openSUSE.
Why might somebody choose that one over the others? What features or vision distinguishes it from the others?
Edit: I love all the answers! Great stuff. Thanks to everyone!
There are a bunch of software-related reasons why openSUSE is a good choice (snapper, zypper, yast, to name a few), although few are exclusive to openSUSE. I think the primary selling point of openSUSE (Tumbleweed) is that it is a rolling release distro that never crashes, never requires attention, and just works. One of the reasons people don’t talk about it is probably that it is boring. All packages are tested extensively. It never breaks. And even if it did break, the default btrfs file system and snapper ensure that the system doesn’t stay broken for longer than it takes to reboot.
If you want a distro that is up to date, easy to use, and dependable, openSUSE is a fantastic choice. It’s just not very exciting to have something that never requires attention; a lot of people use Linux because they like things requiring attention.
As an afterthought, I also think the fact that openSUSE and its users seem to be pathologically unable to create any logo or symbol for anything even tangentially related to the distribution that doesn’t look like absolute shit might be holding them back.
One of the reasons people don’t talk about it is probably that it is boring.
The curse of competency. The stuff people mostly talk about is the stuff people are complaining about.
I don’t remember who said it, but a writer once commented that the reason there’s so much conflict at the center of novel plots is because nobody wants to read a book about old Mrs Harrington, who lives a quiet, happy, commented life, spending her days working in her garden. Because it’s boring.
I think it’s mostly because a lot of users here are quite new. After a few years, you just want to do things with your system, not to it.
Back in the 90s I was all for breaking stuff and installing weird shit all the time (distributions were also much more rustic at the time). Nowadays, the less I notice my system, the better.
(So I run Tumbleweed)
I just got it tumbleweed is a rolling release because tumbleweeds roll in the wind.
And they said Germans couldn’t make fun jokes?
That’s exactly why I am on Tumbleweed as well.
I am not German myself, but most of my colleagues are. Having gotten to know the German attitude towards technology, I feel I understand why life with openSUSE is as uneventful as it is. How anyone got them to adopt something as subversively radical as a rolling release model is something of a mystery to me, but I won’t complain.
As an afterthought, I also think the fact that openSUSE and its users seem to be pathologically unable to create any logo or symbol for anything even tangentially related to the distribution that doesn’t look like absolute shit might be holding them back.
As shallow as it might seem, good branding is really important, since it has the power to instantly convey vision or commitment to a project.
But to your point about low-maintenance distros, I wonder how the immutable landscape will look in the next five years!
and broken btrfs systems don’t stay broken for longer than it takes to reboot
Not true. Fedora and others use BTRFS too and just dont deal with snapshots at all.
I dont care about traditional Fedora but that is pretty bad. TW is way better here.
Thanks for this clarification. I didn’t consider that someone might run btrfs without snapshots, but I suppose that might even be quite common. I don’t get out much.
I still find it quite baffling that for a distro that pitches itself as an everyday Linux distro for newer and intermediate users, Fedora doesn’t come with snapshots preconfigured out of the box or any obvious way of handling a system restore.
Yes traditional Fedora is useless in that regard. Their offline updates also dont really work reliably.
Rpm-ostree (“Fedora Atomic Desktops”) Fedora meanwhile is really really nice.
Opensuse tumbleweed is probably the most stable rolling release, so you get the newest software without everything breaking. Also Yast is an amazing utility that allows you to administer your system entirely with a GUI
I used it a while ago in a VM, and I was impressed how it felt like everything just worked.
Plus, it’s just fun that the CLI system update command is
zypper upI think for TW it’s zypper dup. up is for leap.
Could be! I have no idea, since I used it many years ago.
How is it with running Steam and how is its bluetooth controller support for Xbox controllers?
No problems in my experience
That’s not really distro specific.
Really? Because FreeBSD has bluetooth issues. Xpadneo doesn’t work with all distros. Hell, I can’t even get the authentic Proton VPN app on KDE Plasma. So please explain how my question isn’t valid.
FreeBSD isn’t a Linux distribution. And Steam is available as a flatpak which work the same on all distributions.
Yeah, shittily. Flatpak is sandboxed which causes issues for many games, least of which are anti-cheat issues, and it’s a huge pain in the ass, if not impossible, to get working correctly. The fact you suggest Flatpak for such a thing just shows you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground.
I dont like that Yast competes with the KDE Settings, but having everything in a GUI is key and distros should fork it.
Not that much, Yast deals with the system, the Kde settings deal with the desktop. There isn’t that much overlap.
I think there is. KDE settings deal with Bluetooth, devices etc. Discover deals with repos and more.
Every time I’ve tried to use discover it was a mess. I think you can use it if you use nothing else, or you’re better off forgetting about it entirely.
I use it with Fedora Atomic KDE, rpm-ostree is not meant for that and a pain to use so I remove the package.
The Flatpak integration doesnt use PackageKit and works well, but it doesnt display the data nicely and is too slow. GNOME software is way better for Flatpaks, COSMIC Apps is way faster.
It is useful for fwupd but at the same time a bit bulky for that.
It is also a frontend for all the KDE Extensions and works very well here.
Tumbleweed is rock solid. I took out an old Intel based Macbook that has not been updated in two years (I stopped traveling for work and no longer needed a laptop so the software got outdated). OpenSuse Tumbleweed updated flawlessly. It switched to the newest gcc, switched over to pipewire, etc. without a single issue. I did not read the latest news as I used to do on Arch.
Also, OpenSuse is a family of distros. Choose what works for you. Tumbleweed is the main product and the base of all Suse offerings (and I recommend it).
- Tumbleweed rolls similarly to Arch but has more QA testing
- Slowroll is just snapshots of Tumbleweed that are updated less frequently. May replace Leap.
- Leap does traditional releases similar to other OSes such as Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu
- MicroOS (and its flavors) update the same way Android does; as a full image. You could pick a MicroOS flavor such as Aeon (Gnome) or Kalpa (KDE) and stick to Flatpaks which as a strategy works great on the Steamdeck but I have yet to try it on desktop.
As someone who has tried several Linux distributions what was important to me was how stable updates were. On that old Macbook, that I used for ten years; I mostly used Chakra, Arch, and Tumbleweed. That Tumbleweed install was at least six years old.
I did have one issue, but it was a kernel introduced bug. Long since fixed. Someone messed up Apple EFI boot; so I had to load the EFI menu when booting and then select my internal SSD to start the OS.
MicroOS (and its flavors) update the same way Android does; as a full image
They don’t. They update with regular packages. The updates are atomic though and are only applied at next boot, so there’s less of a risk of weird breakages.
Thank you for the correction. I totally did not notice that.
Automated package testing before each update rolls out to users.
In the event that an update does break your system, you can roll back to the last snapshot from the grub menu (using the smart btrfs setup that is the installation default).
Also generally, maintained by very smart people, community is not toxic, corporate overlords more benign than most, IMO.
Thanks for asking the question. Apparently I need to check out opensuse!
I’ve been using oS:TW for over a year now. It’s extremely stable for a rolling release distro. Plus if something does break, snapper rollbacks from the grub menu are set up by default. I’ve only had rollback once though due to a fucky Nvidia update.
Fucky Nvidia updates are the exact sort of thing I’m aiming to mitigate with my next OS choice. I use Bazzite on a spare laptop, and I’ve had to do rollbacks on that before; it’s extremely handy to have that capability out of the box!
Only community distro that has a fully a path to fully FOSS commercially supported Linux (no proprietary package repo like Ubuntu with snap, no EULA limiting your 4 software freedoms ala Redhat).
What up with the fedora EULA?
Fedoras is ok, but they don’t offer commercial support that is handled by RedHat with their derived commercial disttos.
It was the only distro that worked out of the box with my laptop. Everything else for some reason would crash when returning from hibernate/lid close. I was a long time Ubuntu user years ago that went back to windows when 7 came out. 11/copilot/recall was a step too far so I decided to go back. No dice with Ubuntu, Manjaro, arch, popos, mint, Ubuntu again etc etc. Suse just worked. I have leap (just updated to 15.6 last night) on my main laptop and tumbleweed on my travel laptop. I’m very happy with them both.
It worked the best for me in a VM, when I was giving it a trial. Not that the others were bad by any stretch (I have Bazzite on an older laptop and love it), but it was almost like it was meant to be there.
From some of the other answers here, I might have to look into it some more as a candidate to replace my current Windows install
I have the same result in my current survey. Nobody openly talks about OpenSUSE a lot.
That doesnt mean they dont have many users, but they are not really active in general online forums.
There was also not a lot of people moving from it to something else.
OpenSUSE to SEL is similar to Fedora to RHEL. I dont know why Fedora gets more focus.
This is often random, and I think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed may be better than traditional Fedora, as they use BTRFS snapshots automatically.
Meanwhile, Fedora Atomic Desktops are WORLDS better than their Kalpa and Aeon, and you can also see that by their forks /variants.
OpenSUSE has Aeon and the barely maintained Kalpa, Fedora has tons of variants and way more inofficial ones. Especially uBlue made cool user accessible tooling and they are good at shipping tailored distros like Bazzite or Bluefin/Aurora.
I’m also interested in openSUSE, but what held me back from Tumbleweed was the statement on their Wiki: “If you don’t know how to compile your own additional kernel modules and you don’t wish to learn or keep a very close eye on what is being updated, please don’t use Tumbleweed.” (https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed)
But here people say it “just works” and it’s a great distro. I’m torn :), I’d like to try it, but I’m not sure I wanna follow all updates all the time to make sure it runs fine.
Tumbleweed user here. I have no idea how to compile additional kernel modules. I do keep track of what’s changed on every update, though, but that’s because I find it exciting. Seeing that update icon in the morning makes me happy. I am sure you don’t need to care as much about it as I do. You can upgrade every now and then without looking too close, and be very happy
OpenSUSE people are awesome at gatekeeping.
Just jump into the Aeon or microOS Matrix room and ask how to add a repo or install an app as RPM.
but I rarely see much talk about openSUSE.
Probably because most of the openSUSE users talk in German elsewhere.
