SUSE Linux Enterprise Opens Its Development Model to the Public
linuxiac.com
linuxiac.com
I haven't used it since. I googled for "sled Linux review" to see what I've been missing. The top hit on Google is from 2006. "Tumbleweed" indeed.
Any of you boffins use opensuse?
For me, Tumbleweed is where the Linux FOSS magic is nowadays.
Leap (I guess) 6 years back, to get a glimpse at how btrfs snapshots/restore worked in practice (I think the tool it builds upon is snapper). At the time I was using LVM snapshots on Fedora and found the btrfs snapshots way slower than what I was doing with LVM.
Then I tried Tumbleweed a couple of years back, with the intent of switching to another rpm based distro that is more upstream. Installation was slow and the package downloads didn't have retry logic built in so I had to go through the process of couple of times. Had a few things to tweak since SUSE doesn't use NetworkManager but networkd (or something like that), which was giving me some trouble I can't recall. YaST might be cool for power users, but as I'm always using Ansible for system configuration I skip past it and modify files directly anyway.
Worked fine, but in the end didn't find enough upsides to switch to it from Fedora. I might give it another try a few years down the line.
However, I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed (KDE edition) for 5 years on laptops now and I think this is the one that gives the most polished experience. That's because of several things such as:
- KDE is up to date. And each new version is strictly better and more polished than the previous one, and that has been true for years
- One-click install actually works, even for software in repositories you haven't configured yet, and foreign repositories are way easier to use than PPAs.
- YaST is good for the occasional thing I can't bother to learn to do from the command line
- Zypper is very good too. And allow you to interactively chose solutions when something goes wrong instead of failing fast like apt.
- it is a rolling release with both the polish and the software catalogue of a regular distribution. There's no unsupported AUR repository to add and manage for widespread software, it's usually already in the core repositories.
- new software version on Linux desktop matters. For instance, today I (finally!!) have flawless pinch zoom both with the touchpad and the touchscreen, both on X and Wayland. Many distributions don't seem to have it yet.
I keep a Debian systemd container for the occasional thing that's easier to install on Debian, or to work around the occasional glitch (for instance Meld is currently broken for me on openSUSE Tumbleweed but it works fine on Debian Bullseye).
What drew me to openSUSE is the difficulty to have up to date KDE software on Debian. Had Debian have a current KDE repository, I would probably have never discovered openSUSE. On Ubuntu you can use Neon, but Ubuntu is annoying because of Snap and stuff (if you are going out of your way to package something, just use goddam Debian packages, not some half-arsed container technologies depending on a service that runs proprietary software and that does not distinguish between free and non free software). Also openSUSE's integration is really good and seems more stable than KDE Neon.
So, Debian on servers and openSUSE on desktops for me.
> There's no unsupported AUR repository to add and manage for widespread software, it's usually already in the core repositories.
There is some software that is missing, but you can get it with OPI from OBS, often times pulling from repositories by SUSE.
Though not moving too fast is one of the best features of Debian.
Most of their tools were cardboard cut-outs with severe bugs and lacking functionality. Every one of these projects I was promised by SuSE they would do better but ended up losing key clients that were important for my survival.
They have lost the plot the moment they introduced yast2 (their only ever value proposition at the time compared to other distros was yast).
I haven't seen a SuSE in the wild since the same time I stopped peddling them. They're extremely dependent on consultants who risk their reputation and whose jobs it is to perpetually apologize to customers. I don't think SuSE has much of an impact outside Germany, and I'm surprised they still exist.
> I was promised by SuSE they would do better but ended up losing key clients that were important for my survival.
How did this happen exactly? If SuSE was not polished enough for these clients, did you not have the possibility to switch to Red Hat or Debian instead?
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SUSE-Ada...
I made a quick mirror of the submitted article at https://archive.ph/dW5bF
When open source developers make a rolling release it's a niche techie fetish but when CentOS does it suddenly it's "enterprise" it's wild what companies will pass off as "production ready" to managers.
It really depends, if you want to install things like a big oracle db, then a classical LTS distro is better. But if your instances have short/medium lifecycles and good tests in place, then a rolling distro can even be a time saver (because you migrate your scripts/confs all the time a bit, and nothing massive like from a 10yo release to the new one)
The only visible difference I can see, is that embargoed bug fixes will hit RHEL first before CentOS stream.
This apparently is very difficult for people to understand.
It's no different to enabling the bullseye-updates repository in Debian. You get the updates from the next point release early, but it never contains breaking changes.