OpenSUSE Is an Amazing Underestimated Distribution | Hacker News Reader

OpenSUSE Is an Amazing Underestimated Distribution

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61 points_johh28 comments

> Most of the lights are going toward distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro.. And those shiny new distributions.

OpenSUSE I don't think really compares against any of those distros. SUSE Linux and OpenSUSE really compare better agains RHEL/CentOS. I think the biggest reason that SUSE lags behind most other distros has less to do with other distros being "shiny" and more to do with strong network effects. I tend to use CentOS or Ubuntu LTS simply because I know that googling "centos 7 <problem I'm currently having>" tends to yield a lot more high quality resources than most other distros.

> "centos 7 <problem I'm currently having>" tends to yield a lot more high quality resources than most other distros.

And yet, most of the time the best resource I find is Arch's wiki ;)

The Arch wiki is fantastic. I've not heard an explanation as to why it is so much better than Ubuntu/Redhat. A community of tinkerers? Lack of hegemonic domination from Redhat/Canonical?

Probably because it's generic enough to be applicable to the broader Unix ecosystem. I refer to the Arch Wiki all the time even though my Linuxen are almost exclusively either Slackware or openSUSE.

The downside, though, is that some distros have specific tooling for solving a problem, and that tooling is often more appropriate than the information in the Arch Wiki (though the AW still helps if you want to understand what those tools are doing and why).

Though to be fair, Arch (applies for any extended OS wiki kind of) wiki is so extended because 'they' had a lot of (user) issues.

I used to use arch quite a bit, even had my own spinoff but some fundamental package changes made by the core devs for critical services (network and the switch to systemd) got very annoying and simply too unreliable with update rounds to run any production stuff on it.

Maybe SUSE users don't have as many problems to search for?

Those users might also be utilizing the OS differently than you.

I've always had a soft spot for this distro, opensuse have been a quiet innovator over the years. top notch distro, really deserves to be more popular than it is.

Yep! Absolutely great ethos this distro has, pretty easy (and fun) to contribute to :)

    https://build.opensuse.org/

Completely agreed. Used it heavily when I was working as a web server administrator in a Novell OES shop so that we could cross-train with the Novell administrators. It was stable, had good package availability, was usable both on the desktop and server, and just quietly did it's thing. Have never had challenges like I had with Redhat or Oracle Linux.

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The out-of-the-box support for joining an AD domain through YaST makes openSUSE the obvious choice when I need Linux and Windows systems to play nicely with one another. No other distro that I've tried comes anywhere close.

Hell, no other distro that I've tried offers anything really comparable with YaST in general, AFAICT. It's why openSUSE w/ Xfce is my go-to for migrating folks off Windows desktops (especially XP).

Every time I've had to use SUSE, I've ended up getting bitten by one really bizarre implementation choice over another.

Point in case, about 4-5 years ago I was fighting the extremely strange mechanism they'd built in for managing firewalls, and the set of init scripts associated with it. It was utterly bizarre, even with multiple people looking at it, trying to wrapping their collective heads around it.

Been using openSuse for years for personal device OS, highly recommend it. I would part ways about Snapper though, by default it periodically fills the root partition, preventing normal booting ... took a while for me to figure that one out....

I had the same problem, again after being a user for years. I ended up eventually rebuilding the system on xfs, ditching Snapper and the vagaries of btrfs. Not every release is solid though and you can go a few iterations before hitting a really good one. I've been on Leap 42.1 for a long time now.

That hit me for the first time 2 weeks ago. I spent a good 4 hours troubleshooting it. None of the tools or commands for analyzing disk usage counted the snapshots since it was in a hidden directory. Stupid glob star. 400GB of snapshots later I was back in business.

> I would part ways about Snapper though, by default it periodically fills the root partition, preventing normal booting

I have been there, too. It was very annoying.

Fortunately it happened to me on a sunday morning when it was raining cats and dogs outside.

I deployed NFS/LDAP/KRB5 OpenSuSE at work with autoyast. Autoyast is the only automated installer thing that ever worked mostly as intended. Debian preseed is just horrible. Never tried kickstart though.

The SuSE stuff is hairy and there are bugs, but they put the elbow grease into it and it shows.

SLES was great until their parent company (Novell) went bankrupt, so much smoother than RH. Great driver support and high end system integration (HA, big NFS). But there were always packaging difficulties because there was a huge delay between releases. Just never had enough engineers to keep up with other systems.

Novell isn't their parent company anymore. Hasn't been since 2006 when Novell was bought by Attachmate. Attachmate then got bought by Microfocus which absorbed Attachmate, NetIQ, and Novell. SUSE survived and is an independent business unit. SLES 12 is solid.

Attachmate staved them of capital. Many of the best engineers left, e.g. for Red Hat. SLES has improved a little of late, but still far behind.

If you can do your post-install configuration at the command-line (as a script), kickstart works well. I've done that in a few places. The PXE support for kickstart scripts is nice too.

SuSE was the first Linux distro I used, so it will always have a special place in my heart.

Last year, I kind of went on a buying spree and got myself two new laptops (in my defense, I'll point out I got an awesome bargain). I tried to install Debian on them, but the installer froze on both machines.

That's when I gave Tumbleweed a try, and I was pleasantly surprised. The major drawback is that a rolling release distro requires far more frequent reboots than, say, Debian or CentOS. At least once a week a package gets updated that is so central to the system (kernel, libc, systemd, ...) that a reboot is practically required. Besides that, I have been very happy with it for the past ~12 months.

Personally I looked at OpenSUSE after watching "Linux Sucks". Mostly I skip distro's that use KDE as their main Desktop Environment. Besides that KDE provides a lot, I found it extremly confusing since it's overloaded. Gnome 3 however did the exact opposite, they removed nearly everything. however the later version tend to offer exactly what most people need (- a dock not sure why they don't prolly because they don't want to be ubuntu/mac). But I try to reinstall OpenSUSE in my VM with Gnome3 now, since it looks that it also has a good support for that.

The thing that keeps me from investigating/investing in the Suse ecosystem is the lack of a free LTS offering.

OpenSuse is Fedora, not Centos which is what they need IMHO.

They don't have first class support for Nvidia's drivers on Tumbleweed, and Leap's cycle is too slow, so that rules it out for me at least.

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Same here.

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