OpenSUSE Leap 15.3
news.opensuse.org
news.opensuse.org
The big thing with this release is Leap now uses the same binaries as SUSE Enterprise, giving better support options. A good CentOS replacement for those still looking.
Unless your company requires you to use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Linux (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/defe...), which is supported on RHEL, CentOS, SLES, and a few others, but not openSUSE ("distributions [...] that are not explicitly listed are unsupported, even if they are derived from the officially supported distributions").
What do they actually do, other than actually increasing attack vectors?
That's the main-point of having a Antivirus :-)
But if one needs to check for (windows) virus's do it on the file-server/email-server level and not on the linux endpoint, use something like selinux and a host intrusion detection system instead, it's just a waste of money and power to use a antivirus...even on a good maintained windows.
Even for the Microsoft software that "supports" OpenSUSE, historically that support was by expecting OpenSUSE users to use their RHEL packages which didn't always work well. [1] [2] (I don't know if the problems are still there, because I switched to the Docker image for `az` and stopped using `powershell`)
One of the things I liked about CentOS was not having to upgrade every x months/years.
Tumbleweed got Gnome 40 stable before Fedora 34 was released and it’s been rock solid for me since day 1. And updates are generally extremely safe because if an update breaks your system you can just rollback to a previous Btrfs snapshot with one command and a reboot, wait a bit and issues are fixed very quickly.
While it was intended for servers, if you set it up right it can be an openSuSE equivalent of Fedora Silverblue, even better if you prefer Plasma as I do. It takes a little work to get to an exact equivalent (IIRC toolbox had to be installed and some extra set up after install).
Also to note, if you don't want a rolling version, Leap does offer a transactional server option in the installer.
I'm using a transactional-update based leap server for a container host right now and it's been awesome - I just upgraded it to 15.3 and seems to be working just fine as well.
I had installed / on an nvme drive which my BIOS doesn't boot from, so I have /boot on a separate partition. Breaks on every kernel update (although trivial to fix).
It's a pity because the fastest way to scare the average user away from Linux is to force them to open a shell in order to have a working setup. Hopefully that's something that'll change.
As a technical user, I enjoy it though. YaST is great for configuring many parts of the system, the documentation is great and it's stable. If Nix ever gets usable, I might give it a shot, but it's OpenSuse all the way for now [1]
[0]: https://en.opensuse.org/Additional_package_repositories
I guess the reason is that their corporate lawyers tell them that they must not do it. There might be patent issues buried in that code.
openSUSE has a nice pacing, it's new enough to be a great platform but it's not changing so quickly you need a fresh installation every handful of months or you're constantly fixing things. The tooling is good as well, there are some aesthetic things I kind of dislike (like some of the config files in /etc should be a layer deeper, ATMO) but it works well and it's well made. Major upgrades tend to work and aren't that scary.
The transactional system versions (MicroOS and then TW can be installed as "transactional") are potentially game changers. The snapper integration with btrfs and grub makes a really compelling case if you've ever needed it; btrfs seems like it's getting closer and closer.
This is my interpretation: If you go back to when RHEL was spawned, there were sort of two distinct styles of Linux systems, they were very much and east coast and west coast sort of style. UNIX dorks may disagree with this, but SuSe has provided something more like a European style. They have tools for updating configuration files and they provide some opinions on how things should be run. Once you get used to it and in to it, it's nice.
It's really powerful.
Checkout what opensuse is currently building here; https://build.opensuse.org/monitor
Actually the service is completely open and cross-distro. Everybody can build anything for all major distros. In practice the majority is probably related to OpenSUSE.
I have built packages for OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Arch. Just for myself if I needed to patch or try out something or I needed something not available in the standard distro repos.
Overall I'm very happy with Leap, and Yast makes some of the more complicated things a lot more straightforward.
But NetBSD would be the best match for your G5
Too many programs that I was not able to install due to dependency problems. This is rarely a problem under Ubuntu. But I admit that it has been ages that I moved away from SuSE.
I will likely leave Ubuntu if snap becomes too common or the rule.
By the way, SuSE does an IPO soon but the IPO price looks steep.
I can see if I were a package maintainer I might have a different opinion, and get "tired" (more like "fed up", no pun intended) of a format.
I only had to make my own packages once or twice when I was a Debian user, Debian packages seemed a chore, and I always resorted to using things like checkinstall and debhelper.
With RPM, I don't hesitate to write a spec when I need a package of a piece of software not provided in the repos, and spec files are pretty easy to work with. (I tend to favor using packages over 'make install').
But I would never switch to Deb, that's just a pain.