OpenSUSE Linux gains momentum | Hacker News Reader

OpenSUSE Linux gains momentum

linuxiac.com

174 pointsjrepinc151 comments

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I do share the positive sentiment for opensuse and its increase in popularity, but these sentences are just ridiculous:

> known for its stability, versatility, and ease of use

> powerful package management system, an intuitive installer, and robust security features.

> strong focus on user experience and flexibility

> it will not let you down

> the user can rely on predictability.

> a high-end enterprise Linux distribution that you can rely on

> offer their users uncompromising release quality and top-notch support throughout their lifecycle

> with-user-in-mind approach, reliability, and community-driven development model

Maybe tone down the koolaid a notch.

For some of those I agree with you, but I think several of those are easy claims to defend.

> strong focus on user experience [...] it will not let you down [...] the user can rely on predictability. [...] offer their users uncompromising release quality

Fair claims in light of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed's extensive testing. It is remarkably stable for a rolling release distro, and furthermore, Tumbleweed comes pre-configured with BTRFS and snapper. That means that if anything does go wrong, rolling it back is trivial. Compared to Debian Sid, I now do much less fiddling and fixing. This is the main reason I use Tumbleweed instead of Sid; I got sick of worrying about breakage every time I updated Sid.

> powerful package management system

Zypper has a SAT solver for dependency resolution, in my experience it works a lot better than apt/yum, which I always found prone to jamming themselves particularly during dist updates. Maybe the situation has changed recently, I haven't kept up with apt/etc developments, but assuming that situation hasn't changed much in the past 10 years I think it is fair to say Zypper is more powerful than most of the competition.

> a high-end enterprise Linux distribution that you can rely on [...] offer their users uncompromising release quality

True, for SUSE Enterprise Linux.

> strong focus on user experience and flexibility [...] with-user-in-mind approach

True: YaST. In this regard SUSE is far ahead of Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu/etc. I believe whatever Mandrake derivatives might still exist have something similar.

FWIW, Fedora these days use dnf, which uses libsolv under the hood.

https://github.com/rpm-software-management/dnf https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf/

dnf has copied zypper's other innovations as well, like vendor change.

It's also fully usable on openSUSE, as a replacement for zypper, if you so desire. :)

dnf and zypper are the best of the 'old school' package managers, in my experience (and to my taste). If want traditional package management, you can't go wrong with either.

what are you calling the new school?

Nix probably?

Yep, but I'd also count some package managers which have learned from Nix but chosen a slightly different path by relaxing the requirement of 'purity', or leaning harder on containerization features.

Besides the ones I mentioned in my reply which is a sibling to yours, I think the package managers for Haiku and RedoxOS fall into this category (but I can't be sure! I've never used them, so my memory of how where work is likely to have gaps).

There isn't a single one, but off the top of my head, the following package managers have been used to meet the same need (building Linux distros) but use distinct and relatively new paradigms or techniques:

  - Guix, Nix
  - Distri
  - Luet

(I'm personally partial to the 'functional' school, which means Nix and Guix. :)

One might also count package managers that are designed for building large, multi-language distributions of software but have never been used to build a whole distro. In that case, you could also include

  - Spack
  - Denxi

and finally you might also include tools that build on top of the traditional stuff, like `rpm-ostree`. This is what you're dealing with on Fedora Silverblue, SteamOS, openSUSE MicroOS, etc.

Also distinct from these but not particularly new are source-based package management systems, like

  - source-based Linux distro package managers incl.
    - emerge
    - paludis
    - sorcery
  - various ports systems, incl.
    - pkgsrc
    - Ravenports
    - FreeBSD Ports
    - Dragonfly BSD's DPorts
    - MacPorts
    - Homebrew

but those aren't really in the mainstream of system-wide package management, at least from my Linux-centric perspective, so I don't usually mean them when I refer to 'traditional' or 'conventional' package managers without any other qualifiers.

Anyway yeah, plain old openSUSE and Fedora are great choices if you don't want a declarative system or immutable Linux, and that is in part because zypper and dnf are best-in-class for their paradigm.

wow, thank you! but are there linux distros that use any of these "from scratch" or as their native system for updating the kernel and reconfiguring grub, etc? or, to ask a different way, could these systems do that?

NixOS and GuixSD are distros built entirely around Nix and Guix, respectively.

In a word: yes! That I know of, Guix, Nix, and Luet are the only ones with whole, bootable Linux distros built on top of them so that the 'package manager' also does configuration management in some form. (IIRC, Luet is more traditional here, it manages config files only state fully and partially, using hooks and triggers.) The operating systems built on them are GuixSD, NixOS, and MoccacinoOS, respectively. I'm not sure what the status of MoccacinoOS is, but GuixSD and NixOS are very usable and very worth checking out.

Distri is a system-wide package manager, but its distro is a PoC. It has a small package collection and no users, last I checked. But it has some cool innovations and it's very fast, so if you want to play with building a distro on a next-gen package manager, it seems great!

I think Denxi could be used to build an OS in a similar way as Nix, but I'm not aware of any such effort currently. The same is true of Spack.

Haiku and RedoxOS have some fancy Nix-like package management features as well, in terms of rollbacks and multiple versions of transitive dependencies playing nice together on the same system, and maybe in some other ways, too.

Have you ever tried pacman? I’ve used pacman, zypper, dnf, apt, and apk (a few times), and found that (for me) pacman is the best, with its flags, while not making sense to a beginner, are very versatile, e.g. -Syu (sync and update all packages), -Rsn (remove a package and all its dependencies unneeded by other packages and its config files), etc. apk might be a tad faster, but I’ve found pacman to be much faster than dnf, although I can’t remember exactly how fast zypper is since it’s been a few months since I used OpenSUSE. PKGBUILDs are also a great part of the pacman system, and while I’ve not written any yet myself, I can mostly understand what they are doing, and I’m fairly sure I would be able to write one if needed, whereas when I tried to write an RPMspec (? might have gotten that name wrong) I gave up after an hour of trying.

> Have you ever tried pacman?

I have! I'm personally not a fan. I've generally experienced pacman as incomplete, brittle, and clunky.

For me, giving up the speed of pacman for the robustness, flexibility, nicer CLI, and feature completeness of dnf or zypper is an easy tradeoff to make.

> I’ve found pacman to be much faster than dnf, although I can’t remember exactly how fast zypper is since it’s been a few months since I used OpenSUSE

Compared to pacman, zypper is slow like dnf— probably slightly slower.

> PKGBUILDs are also a great part of the pacman system, and while I’ve not written any yet myself, I can mostly understand what they are doing, and I’m fairly sure I would be able to write one if needed, whereas when I tried to write an RPMspec (? might have gotten that name wrong) I gave up after an hour of trying.

It's been a long time since I ran openSUSE on the daily, but when I did I managed a repo of RPM packages and I'm pretty sure I created at least some of their spec files from scratch, although most were downstream forks or packages I imported from elsewhere.

I don't know what made it click for me, but I found it a little easier than DEB packaging (maybe in part because I learned it later), and definitely manageable.

But I hear you: PKGBUILDs are widely praised for their simplicity, and it clearly helps a lot of people make good use of the packaging system. That's a real strength.

> incomplete, brittle, and clunky.

I don’t see where you might experience incompleteness in pacman, although I might see how you could experience it to be clunky. Do you mind humouring me and explaining this further?

> flexibility

I’m also not sure where dnf is more flexible, although I probably never explored it fully. What do you find about pacman to be inflexible?

> nicer CLI

This I most definitely understand. Even after over a year of using pacman I don’t try to understand why flags are named what they are (looking at you —-Sync), but having memorised them I do quite enjoy pacman.

> I’m fairly sure I created at least some of their spec files from scratch

It could just be my low intellect manifesting itself I suppose, so next time I have a Linux install using rpm I’ll try again.

Thanks for replying to my questions, it’s always interesting to hear from Linux veterans!

> It could just be my low intellect manifesting itself I suppose, so next time I have a Linux install using rpm I’ll try again.

No, I think I have a high pain tolerance for Linux stuff in general and packaging stuff in particular. I got into Linux before I started high school, and Linux package management immediately struck me as something beautiful, powerful, and almost magical at that age. That sustained fascination has meant that I can tolerate different learning curves in that domain than in others.

Additionally, by the time I started messing with RPM packaging, I had already packaged for Gentoo, Arch, and Ubuntu, so I think I had already developed some intuitions for how to explore packaging systems and their documentation.

> I don’t see where you might experience incompleteness in pacman, although I might see how you could experience it to be clunky. Do you mind humouring me and explaining this further?

Tbh, here I'm probably holding old shit against Pacman that no longer applies. But when I daily drove Arch and later Chakra Linux many years ago, I remember these things being absent when zypper (and others) had them

  - repo management
  - multilib support
  - package signing
  - key management

but all of those were added to pacman within 2 or 3 years of when I stopped daily driving Arch-based distros.

I would still characterize pacman as missing one or two sensible built-ins, although this is a matter of preference— anywhere in the Pacman Rosetta where you see pacman piped back into itself... that should just be a built-in, imo.

> I’m also not sure where dnf is more flexible, although I probably never explored it fully. What do you find about pacman to be inflexible?

Sure, I can give some examples. This also relates to some of the brittleness. Pacman's dependency resolver doesn't consider installed packages in a first-class way— it only examines version constraints for new stuff or updates it's grabbing from the repo. This is part of why 'partial upgrades' aren't supported and all of why your AUR-installed packages are liable to break after `pacman -Syu`, requiring sane AUR wrappers to rebuild your AUR packages after each system upgrade.

Package managers like dnf and zypper make it possible to group specific repos together and mark them as interchangeable when evaluating updates. They also have facilities for tracking which repos (or classes of equivalent repos) you've gotten packages from and make it easy to tell when an upgrade or installation might require you to change the 'supplier' of a given package. It's easy to prioritize and layer multiple repos together in a sane way without breaking your system with them, but with pacman all you have to will with is a total order for whole repositories, and the Ignore(Pkg|Group) configurations.

Honestly I should probably try running Arch again for a while to help update what I think of pacman.

> Additionally, by the time I started messing with RPM packaging, I had already packaged for Gentoo, Arch, and Ubuntu, so I think I had already developed some intuitions for how to explore packaging systems and their documentation.

Ah, that might have helped I suppose. I haven’t done any sort of packaging in the past so that might have not helped.

> but all of those were added to pacman within 2 or 3 years of when I stopped daily driving Arch-based distros.

Ah, that would explain why I hadn’t experienced that myself, having only switched to Arch about a year ago now.

> it only examines version constraints for new stuff or updates it's grabbing from the repo. This is part of why 'partial upgrades' aren't supported and all of why your AUR-installed packages are liable to break after `pacman -Syu`, requiring sane AUR wrappers to rebuild your AUR packages after each system upgrade.

Isn’t this, while being slightly inflexible, reasonably logical with Arch being rolling release? I was under the impression that you weren’t supposed to upgrade anything individually, as that upgrade might cause the need for a newer version of some dependency, which could break other packages.

> make it easy to tell when an upgrade or installation might require you to change the 'supplier' of a given package

This has worked fine for me with packages installed from the AUR (through yay), although I can’t think of any examples, but I think it’s only happened once or twice.

> Honestly I should probably try running Arch again for a while to help update what I think of pacman.

I would recommend that you do, as Arch is the best distribution ever! :P

Thanks for sharing that information, as I’ve never heard anyone talking about pacman at that time, so I’d assumed it was always like it is now. It was very enlightening.

It’s been about 2 WEEKS since I had apt shoot itself in the foot and basically deadlock in a state where I can’t perform a repair, upgrade, downgrade or reinstall. Time to forcefeed dpkg everything apt and libc

It cured my ED and my skin is clearing up so speak for yourself

I've been having great success running their rolling release (Tumbleweed). I've basically rolled the same install forward for almost a decade on some machines with no real issues.

For people who want the "batteries-included" Ubuntu-like experience, but without the semi-annual release schedule (which often requires a complete reinstall in my experience; upgrading usually has messed up something on my servers), OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a good option to consider.

edit: I primarily recommend this for desktop installations. Server installations may have different requirements, but for a daily driver that will work pretty much everywhere, it is a very good option to consider.

Debian upgrades just work; if you're tired with Ubuntu breaking stuff that's the closest and easiest option.

I have 4 machines (2 desktops, 2 servers) with 10+ years of just being updated, plus few hundred that have 5+ years (we migrated to Debian at work few years ago after using Centos; best decision ever, thousands of lines of code in configuration management removed that were just fixes for centos stuff..)

Did you consider other RHEL-compatible distros (e.g. Alma, Rocky, or even Oracle Linux which I've found to work quite well despite the negativity towards Oracle)?

I'm glad to hear the Debian update process is smooth, as I'm getting started building a homelab this weekend with Proxmox (Debian-based). Definitely don't want to completely reinstall my hypervisor on a regular basis!

From my experience RHEL family distros upgrade fairly painlessly between point releases, but with major releases you are better off just reinstalling because of the massive changes between those releases.

Fedora is also usually pretty easy to upgrade between releases these days as long as you follow the instructions.

RHEL's model is similar to Sun's old model. You sell a small, stable core OS that is well supported for it's lifetime. You are supposed to use it until there is an new version then start using that with the plan for the systems using the old OS to retire. IE. upgrade path is whole-system based and it really isn't designed for upgrading in place.

For servers they have MicroOS, an immutable OS to host services in containers.

Ubuntu semi-annual release? I only upgrade every 2 years when the new LTS comes out. Disabling snap is a small pain but other than that, no issues.

Ubuntu has a release every April (e.g. 22.04) and every October (e.g. 22.10), but I do the same as you, only upgrading when there's a new LTS version.

Snap and Flatpak are two different things.

With LXD, Chromium and now Firefox now gated behind Snap, the only way to disable Snap for good is voting with my feet and using another distro.

That's why I moved to Debian 11 at end of 2022.

There are PPD alternatives for those (at least Firefox, I haven't tried the others).

But yeah, it's starting to look like it's time to think about jumping ship to something else entirely. I'm thinking Manjaro; I want a distro that's serious about KDE (currently using Kubuntu) and there aren't many of those these days.

If you end up Manjaro do yourself a favor and change into the unstable branch. Their model of updates in the stable branch sometimes breaks stuff

> some machines with no real issues

I am really curious about the kinds of issues you encountered.

I'm sure an actual OpenSUSE expert can correct me, but there is some "dependency SAT solver" that SUSE has that resolves software versions. Sometimes it can't figure out what to do, so it'll spit out some prompt during upgrade that can be a bit difficult to decipher (e.g. keep an obsolete dependency, uninstall the thing requiring it, etc). Sometimes I would choose the wrong thing and break something that was relying on some behavior, but not captured by zypper/yum (e.g. a cmake project relying on specific behavior of some native library). Ultimately, that was my fault for being lazy in the "untracked external dependency" department, and it's easy to roll back with snapper.

> I'm sure an actual OpenSUSE expert can correct me, but there is some "dependency SAT solver" that SUSE has that resolves software versions. Sometimes it can't figure out what to do, so it'll spit out some prompt during upgrade that can be a bit difficult to decipher (e.g. keep an obsolete dependency, uninstall the thing requiring it, etc).

I'm not sure how all of this really shakes out formally, but one of the cool things about using a SAT solver for dependency resolution is that it is guaranteed to be complete: if a solution exists to the dependency resolution problem presented by your package management operation, zypper/libsolv is guaranteed to find it.

But sometimes, a weird thing may happen, and no such solution will exist. In a case like that, the best zypper can do is offer to amend your request in various (hopefully) minimal ways, and ask if you agree that any of those outcomes are 'good enough'. IME, zypper is pretty good at this. But unfortunately, answering those questions may require you to have a clearer picture of your system's state and your goals than many users/administrators do.

The safest thing to do when presented with those prompts is, of course, to abort. But snapper definitely makes messing around and trying your options less punishing than it might be!

It's worth noting that OpenSuSE is one of very few distros in the Windows store, and the only one other than Ubuntu with really solid put-of-the-box interop (e.g. adding Linux apps to the Start menu). I'm really curious if that's had a role.

This is a good observation and it could indeed be a driver.

Distros like Redhat seem to be totally dropping the ball. Basic stuff like icons on the desktop and dragging and dropping files onto icons on the desktop isn't turns on by default and if you do turn it out it is broken. When the bug was reported it was closed without being fixed.

It sounds like you're expecting a different experience than the developers are targeting. Things like "icons on the desktop" aren't really how GNOME 3, the default desktop in RHEL and Fedora, is meant to be used. You might be happier using a different desktop environment.

> You might be happier using a different desktop environment.

What other desktop environment can you use in RHEL without adding third-party repos (which a lot of companies don't allow)?

If you don't like and embrace GNOME 3, then Red Hat just isn't the distro for you.

Who actually chooses to use RHEL on a desktop, rather than only using it because work doesn't allow any other distro?

I’m expecting basic features to work. I don’t mind having to switch those features on through a configuration option but I do mind when those included features don’t actually work and the response when reported by a paying customer is that they aren’t going to fix it.

That’s a really specific and minor gripe. It doesn’t really reflect the way that I’ve used a desktop for, well, ever. Are there other examples that you have?

Well when you have a novice user base familiar with the basic drag and drop mechanism and you’ve build processes they can follow around it and all of a sudden it doesn’t work anymore because you had to upgrade the OS it’s a pain.

I agree, openSUSE is a great choice for a WSL distro (and a great choice for a Linux desktop if you’re a fan of those).

Pengwin is really nice for a Linux distro that is explicitly designed for WSL. It’s just Debian with some custom glue that works really nicely.

It’s not free, but it’s $20 (and I got it on a sale for $10)

I literally went back to ubuntu(popos for the desktop) because fedora/rhel lack a proper wsl integration. I think this is going to become a huge driver for distros in the future as more people use wsl.

In case you aren't aware you can always build your own Fedora WSL install, just not offically from the store. It's definitely not as simple as installing an app from the store but it's not the hardest thing to do, definitely scriptable. https://fedoramagazine.org/wsl-fedora-33/ is a bit old but the steps are still pretty up to date, there are also other guides out there.

I remember the first time I used SUSE - I received some Digital Ultimate Workstation 533au computers from Compaq that were used to make the movie 'Titanic' and they had SUSE preinstalled on them. While I was a fan of Red Hat back then, I was surprised how stable and similar SUSE was to Red Hat - so I kept running it for the remainder of their lifespan. A decade later I ended up authoring the SUSE Certification books for Novell.

After having the Steamdeck, I switched to OpenSUSE tumbleweed with KDE along with my brother at the start of February. We are both moved our gaming machines over from Windows and it has been a great experience, even running the latest triple A titles.

Yast gives a very nice GUI approach to a lot of configuration OpenSUSE. It really feels like the missing Windows Control Panel of Linux.

He is running Intel/Nvidia the only issue we had was some kind of missing grub command when attempting to boot the liveusb. Nvidia even offers opensuse an official repo for their proprietary drivers!

I am running AMD/AMD and the experience was pretty plug and play. The only issue I have is an odd one, my 7900xt randomly gets its memory clock stuck at the lowest power mode. This puts its memory clocks around 200mhz after a period of idling, which makes the system feel unusable. Even launching a game doesn’t switch it out of this power state so they either crash or run at very low frame rates. Changing the refresh rate of my display to any value appears to fix it so I just cycle between options. I’m sure there is some kind of config option I’m missing somewhere. Other than that slight nuisance I can pretty much play anything thanks to Valve and Proton.

The new Big picture mode is also incredible and I find myself moving my desktop over to the TV more and more.

What originally attracted me to OpenSUSE is they have supported BTRFS much longer than most other distros. While snapper isn't the greatest tool, it does make it fairly easy to create regular snapshots of your system, so you can roll back if anything goes awry. The YaST tools also make it fairly easy to administer an OpenSUSE system from both the desktop and terminal. Definitely a high quality distro worth your consideration.

Sorry for the snark but snapper automatically snapshots when invoking zypper for updates, how much easier can it get?

I moved from Kubuntu to OpenSuse Tumbleweed after Firefox snappification. I’m quite happy so far. KDE Plasma experience seems to be better than Kubuntu. On the other hand it is a less popular distro so less hand holding is available - most tutorials and blogs assume Ubuntu so I can’t follow them blindly anymore…

I tried I guess it was SuSE back in the mid-2000's. It was good for an RPM distribution. I'm not an RPM fan though. I've seen the RPM repo corrupt itself on SuSE, Red Hat before the split they did when they created RHEL and later at work on RHEL (one place I worked where they used RHEL). Tried Ubuntu 2006 at home and have used it since then. Run KDE desktop on it.

The Firefox thing was a simple fix since I also don't use snap, I just downloaded the Firefox tar file and run it. Using Help About, it updates itself, fast and efficiently. No snaps needed. No Ubuntu repository needed.

It sounds like those incidents were 20 years ago, though? I've heard similar stories from that era, but the rpmdb getting corrupted hasn't been a prevalent issue for a long time.

The last one was at work with RHEL 10 years ago, it has been long enough I should consider trying an RPM distribution again. Debian based distributions as far as the package repository hasn't give me issues but maybe RPM issues have been sorted out, good point.

Ironically, I much prefer rpm over dpkg for precisely the same reason; faced with approximately the same database corruption, I've recovered rpm where as far as I could tell dpkg was just completely hosed.

This is one of the reasons I will switch from Ubuntu back to Debian. Any Ubuntu tutorial will work for Debian. The laptop I am on today will be my last Ubuntu install.

Access denied Error code 1020

You do not have access to linuxiac.com.

The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site.

Try again, no issues for me. Could it be a vpn issue. Some sites use something to ban what is believed to be spam IP ranges.

Had the same problem as OP, residential IP. It's apparently Cloudflare blocking me. Doesn't bother me, I'll just find something else to read.

Really, honestly people, PLEASE stop using Cloudflare, I beg you.

Same problem - blocked in Thailand. The site owner probably configured blocking by country.

Blocked from India. the open internet is dead my friend......

I'm in Singapore (residential IP) and this error page is a manually set block by the website owner.

Looks like they just blocked a bunch (all?) of Asian countries from visiting the site. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Usually Cloudflare blocks me all the time, I do not know how I was not blocked this time.

If I see that Cloudflare prompt, I do not care what the site offers, I bail and say "I guess they do not care if I read their site. bye-bye"

And yes, please stop using Cloudflare or thngs like that. If you have a site that does not deal with personal finance logins, there is no reason to use Cloudflare or things like that.

Access Denied for me here in India too. Looks like they set up to block by countries.

For something that is boarder line an Ad, why block things. SUSE is based in the EU, I do not think they have crypto export laws that the US had (or maybe still have?).

I doubt they're talking about SUSE blocking them, but the website that was submitted here (linuxiac.com).

This is not a VPN issue, this is a ban by country I was able to access using VPN from USA, but can't access using my IP (Brazil) also using a VPN located here as well.

https://archive.is/qkeN6

Access denied for me in Brazil:

  I got an error when visiting linuxiac.com/opensuse-grows-in-popularity/.
  
  Error code: 1020
  Ray ID: 7ae0279569b602e9
  Country: BR
  Data center: gru08
  Timestamp: 2023-03-26 14:41:27 UTC

Me too in Tokyo... I always wonder when this happens if sites are overloaded, e.g. from getting slashdotted by HN, or just blocking foreign countries for some weird reason / by accident.

    Error code: 1020
    Ray ID: 7ae07d4c9a63204d
    Country: JP
    Data center: nrt05
    Timestamp: 2023-03-26 15:39:58 UTC

I am one of the users who switched in the last year. I picked Fedora KDE spin because 1) it has KDE and GNOME is reputed to be the genius jerk types and KDE acts windowsy and 2) my company was using centos for servers so RPM-based felt familiar.

Now that we are going to Amazon Linux 2 and Fedora puked the bed when upgrading from 32 to 33 and again from 33 to 34, I wanted a change from being the beta tester for RHEL peeps, so I moved to opensuse because I A) can't be bothered to be a gentoo / debian / nixos expert ... I just want a desktop and B) am enough of a picky linux guy that i can't do ubuntu because they are doing the same user-hostile decisions that forced me away from my first love of windows.

All that to say - I would not be surprised at all if a lot of this growth comes from centos 7 -> SLE / opensuse and ubuntu -> opensuse stuff.

> user-hostile decisions that forced me away from my first love of windows.

So well said. Its been travesty after travesty. "First love of Windows" is what really leapt out at me and triggered some dusty memories:

- finally learning how to spell administrator

- G4 Cubes

- Apache Server-Side Includes

- How good Acer's Desktop over Windows 3.11 was

- Kilrathi

- How delightful it was to customize my Win95 desktop. Picking out icons and sounds for too many hours, my AuDHD antidote to middle school.

- The stunning bunch of people I fell in with who had a particular set of skills. Phreaks and Geeks. In retrospect they all grew up to be some fantastic people, but they felt so edgy at the time.

- All of the sounds of computing, playing over PCM speakers, the drives, the models, the hum of simpler fans. The gawdawful desktop mics.

- Dirty, hairy, smelly Mouse balls

- All of the print media about computing before there were consistently good online publications about tech.

- The first time I ever held a $1200 check with my name on it for helping a small business upgrade their Windows machines.

- The ethereal pull of software catalogs

- The smells of burning/smashing capacitors

- Lego Technics

- Elenco Electronic Playground 130 Circuits - the one with the spring terminals.

Look at me ramble on. It's a milestone day for me and I'm feeling nostalgic. I'm sitting here on a Win 11 boot and I haven't taken the time to virtualize it yet (IOMMU Passthru being as it is..). Its really good. It stays out of the way most of the time, and its new APIs + new gen hardware performs very well together. I've been feeling uneasy about using it the whole time, but certain applications for configuring my hardware required it, and the occasional game demands it. I'm really productive in WSL. I've done all I can to disable telemetry but haven't messed with my network yet to filter and block their outbound requests. In any case, I like the system, I detest how they have made it into a tool of supervision and coercion. I'm having similar concerns with some of their groundbreaking APIs and popular services, and I'm frankly at a loss with how to proceed with either topic.

In any case, thank you for reminding me about how I loved Windows, and a lot of memories surrounding it. Not all of them were related to anti-trust, bluescreens, and dystopian corpgov topics. And thanks for plugging Opensuse, and after a honeymoon with Fedora I'm facing some of the "beta tester" experiences as well, and I have too many demands on my time to volunteer in that way for IBM, nor is it my talent.

I just want a good, just-works system that lets me do anything and demands little in return. For that, I am happy to financially support and get involved.

>Fedora puked the bed when upgrading from 32 to 33 and again from 33 to 34

Not sure what you meant by this. Did the upgrades not go well and break your system?

I've been on openSUSE for 10+ years, and it is truly the gift that keeps on giving. The community super knowledgeable and responsive, and the distro is stable.

The biggest advantage openSUSE has compared to other mainline distributions is the openSUSE Build service (OBS). Contributing patches to existing packages is simple, and the build service also hosts custom packages in a personal rep - this let's me keep any custom packages up to date across all my systems. I believe it works with other distros as well so you don't even need to use openSUSE to utilise the service

+1 for OBS.

Maybe the initial learning is not easy. But once you understood how it works it's an unbelievably valuable resource to build packages, slightly modified or not all for any major distro.

I recently needed a package in Fedora 37. They had dropped it after Fedora 36 because of lack of time. I am not a Fedora user, so I had no build environment handy. With OBS it took me minutes to get the package built.

I’ve always been a Debian man, any one know of a good reason to switch?

On a somewhat adjacent topic:

The copy writing in this is atrocious. Ironically, Microsoft Word would have caught several of the errors and confusing statements I saw.

Remember folks—editors are your friends. Pay a modest fee and make your public statements sound as good as you think they do with your wall-eyed author’s mind’s eye.

There is no one main point, but mostly, I'd like to mention open build service[1], where you can easily create and provide your own repo (but you also can create there one for debian); openSUSE Tumbleweed almost on bleeding edge for packages, but stable, so you can use latest GNOME/KDE/other; YaST very useful tool to change system settings; and the last to mention - zypper package manager is suffer than apt, but I found it more comfortable to use. So, mostly I can recommend you to poke with stick LiveISO) [1]: https://build.opensuse.org/

YaST is probably the best Linux configuration tool in the business if you're sick of editing configuration files or typing obscure commands to configure things.

Software versions will mostly be more up to date. Particularly if you use Tumbleweed. It is one of the best rolling release desktop oriented distros out there. There are also the one click installs on OBS (Open Build System) that make it very simple to install software that is either newer or not in the repos at all.

It has an "enterprise" cousin SUSE Enterprise Linux that you can use if you ever need that level of support for things like Oracle, SAP, etc.

I don't really understand why Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora have no system configuration tool. Sure, there is a configuration for the user desktop. But nothing for the system in general. It is only SuSE and Mandrake/Mageia that have such a thing, and those were built in the 1990s.

Fedora and by extension RHEL and its clones have Cockpit:

https://cockpit-project.org/

It's no YaST but it's pretty decent.

Zypper handles multi-repository setups much better than anything Debian-based thanks to the notions of vendor and vendor change. If you need to install proprietary software, add restricted codecs, inject a few bleeding edge packages, or run your own repo (very easy to do via the free openSUSE Build Service, a public instance of the Open Build Service), this feature of the package manager is super nice.

openSUSE has some very good automated QA via OBS, too, so their rolling release (Tumbleweed) is more stable than you might expect.

> I’ve always been a Debian man, any one know of a good reason to switch?

Debian is always way too behind the times.

Even in unstable.

There is none. I was on Ubuntu and one day decided to give opensuse a try. Not everything works out of the box on my laptop eg to get screen dimming I had to download some extra drivers and edit grub config. On Ubuntu you can quickly find instructions how to fix it. On opensuse you're on your own. After fumbling around with config files for a few days went back to Ubuntu.

I have often thought that OBS (the system which builds OPENSuse RPMs and then builds releases) was fairly impressive.

I just find the RPM format horrible to deal with most of the time - trying to create them properly is a misery IMO. Building from SRPMS can be very miserable if you have to do it.

I like rolling distributions and find that Artix suits me:

* packages include header files and development libraries - its' just so much simpler

* no systemd - I like dinit.

* no selinux to drive you crazy.

* no flatpacks OR snaps (thank God)

* I find it comparatively easy to build packages for pacman.

I've been using Tumbleweed for the last few months and it's really good as a stable rolling release distribution. However, I made the mistake of buying a laptop with an NVIDIA discrete card and I'm tormented with small bugs, crashes and glitches from times to times. Both on Gnome and KDE Plasma.

If you are willing to migrate over to Linux, stay away from NVIDIA cards.

I'd rather stay away from Linux than from my trusty nVidia card. Sorry but not sorry. The innovative stuff coming from nVidia can't be ignored (always one or more steps ahead of AMD). Linux can.

My point was about a desktop machine. You could access a cluster of Linux machines with NVIDIA cards from your AMD-based desktop.

I run Tumbleweed on my desktop PC and the laptop, both of which have NVIDIA GPUs. I have to say this is the first time that my systems are bug-free. Previously on Kubuntu I constantly experienced graphical glitches. I pray they don't come back to me again.

I’m really enjoying Mint, it feels like windows but without all the bullshit.

I wish someone would make a distro like mint and get it into offices and schools. Windows is so awful for 99% of use cases but it’s what everyone is used to. Government computers don’t need cortana uploading everything to their servers. They need a distro that offers stability and consistency.

But sadly no KDE spin...

I mean, Mint is basically Ubuntu + Cinnamon DE with a few changes. Surely there exists many Ubuntu + KDE spins out there that are not vanilla Ubuntu. How about Kubuntu? Or KDE Neon?

I used to use SuSE back in the day (around v10 or so), but the issue I had with it was the RPM package management. Several times it managed to get into an inconsistent state on various servers without it obviously being due to my incompetence, so I ended up migrating everything to DEB based systems (Ubuntu was my choice) and have had far less problems since.

I had the same experience. Rustling RPMs was a nightmare back in the day. In fact, it's what moved me from some redhat (SUSE?) back in the day to mandrake linux.

But Mandrake Linux also used RPMs.

Mandrake and Mageia use urpmi. It's a tool similar to apt, yum and zypper. It has been in existence since 1999. It can be used to install packages and also to upgrade a complete system, it will take care of dependencies for you.

> Rustling RPMs

fyi the term is actually "rassling", unless referring to stealing rpms from other ranchers

"Wrangling" is also acceptable

That'll git ya a necktie party sure as shootin'.

What I did with rpms definitely felt criminal.

Are RPMs structurally quite different from DEBs? Or was the problem that RPM tooling was buggy?

Not really, rpm and dpkg are similar and both solid - and have been for years.

Not sure but what instability the parent post is referring to but SuSE V10 came out in 2006 - I suspect the problems have been ironed out.

Quite possibly, but I've also had some issues with the various kernel versions (e.g. "unbreakable") in Oracle Linux v7. I've had the occasional issue with broken dependencies with dpkg, but they've always seemed much easier to resolve and generally involved just uninstalling the broken package.

At the company I work at currently, we're in the process of replacing all Linux-based machines with OpenSUSE... not for any technical merit or reason that I've heard other than, "we should all use the same thing for everything".

So another 20k+ SUSE installations coming from that alone this year.

Market share by mandate; some sales guy at SUSE probably got a big bonus.

For 20k+ users they probably give you more insider info. Did you ask if SLE and Leap are going to continue to be made? Or did you go directly for ALP or MicroOS?

I haven't been privy to those kinds of conversations. Mostly we are replacing Ubuntu LTS and older CentOS with OpenSUSE Leap for servers. Some developers are deploying Tumbleweed as a rolling release.

I'm trying to give it chance, change being hard and all.

The other comments here from long time users are giving me some hope that we may find tangible benefits, especially w.r.t btrfs and snapshots.

What are you replacing?

FWIW IMNHO "use the same thing for everything" is a technical reason ...

Nothing like logging in to a server running some old legacy app and realizing it's running some bespoke version of ancient Oracle Linux (or Gentoo or whatever you happen to be unfamiliar with, but some previous hire thought was the bomb) - and try to untangle what issues stem from the distro, and which belong to the application...

While true, I suppose conformity as a justification could apply to any distro choice. It doesn't justify OpenSUSE specifically in itself.

See a cousin comment from me with a bit more detail... I've probably already said too much.

Couldn't be happier switching to Tumbleweed, it is fast, robust and up-to-date. One of its creators, Richard Brown, explains well why rolling distros are so great https://rootco.de/2020-02-10-regular-releases-are-wrong/.

From my experience, rolling distros tend to be better in practice because regular small incremental changes are often safer and more stable than major OS upgrades that touch everything at once on a bi-yearly basis.

The internet is full of horror stories of users seeing Ubuntu/Fedora upgrades not going they way they're supposed to and braking their system.

The main reason is that (post-acquisition) Redhat, in a push for monetization, killed Centos, thus forcing lots of people to quickly find a replacement… and OpenSUSE happens to be the biggest close enough relative (rpm-based etc) distribution suitable as a replacement. Not that there wouldn't have been even closer candidates (e.g. Alma Linux or Rocky Linux), but those are much smaller (community, backing, etc) than OpenSUSE.

That on the server side… and well, on the desktop side there's the fact that some people dislike the new breed of sandboxed package formats (with fedora pushing flatpak and ubuntu pushing snap), often without seeing the differences between snap and flatpak.

Personally, I think that sandboxed isolation with cgroups/namespaces and bind mounts etc is a step in the right direction, but snap is a total disaster while flatpak does make lots of things right, Redhat/Fedora did made a huge mistake in going for a split-up server/desktop segmentation with RHEL covering the server side with OCI container based solutions (OpenShift and such) and Fedora covering the desktop with Flatpak that is too restrictively desktop-oriented. RPM lacks the isolation/sandboxing of Flatpak and OCI containers, but it was a unified format, and I don't see any good reason that the successor of RPM wouldn't be.

It's a bit tricky for OpenSUSE to replace CentOS at the moment, as their stable distribution Leap is due to be obsoleted and replace with immutable-bases distribution, which is still not quite ready. No one quite knows what happens after Leap 15.5.

Could be because people are looking for alternatives to CentOS.

CentOS stream may not be compatible with some orgs.

Rocky and Alma seem like the natural successors to me, but I guess any distro is fine if it fits your needs.

SUSE has been around for a long time and has always have had strong ties with the corporate world.

One of the nice things about redhat/opensuse was the abi/api compatibility, being able to run much software on newer releases. And RPM is way nicer than APT.

Ran opensuse on sparc like 20 years ago, ran opensuse tumbleweed on my desktop workstation for years. It Just worked. I even have opensuse installed in WSL2 for fun now.

But CUDA is the future, and google and others choses Ubuntu. I love WSL2 being able to install stable diffusion and other gpu enabled apps.

I'm sure it's a great distro. I started out running linux with SuSE 8.1. I tried it once in more recent times, and noticed YaST is still not my favorite tool to actually understand what I'm doing. The install also crashed without giving me much information as to what happened, and I just assumed it was down to bad support for my hardware (which runs Fedora and Ubuntu just fine) and gave up.

Don't know if I should checkout SuSE but Ubuntu definitely doesn't cut it anymore IMO with serious regressions in power management on mainstream hardware (ryzen) and in overall usability ranging from no working kinetic scroll on the touchpad, over broken and minutes-late notifications, to gnome 3+ just overall being a bad fit and wasteful on notebooks with increasingly odd defaults on Ubuntu 22+. Unfortunately, kubuntu didn't cut it for me either; don't need gnome or kde apps anyway. Snaps suck, too, and their update mechanism is a serious regression compared to regular apt (always need to download everything, no control, etc). Maybe SuSE works better, but I thought SuSE has also turned to gnome after historically being a KDE-based distro? Never liked yast2; Debian/Ubuntu apt has always worked better for me.

Right now I'm back on a Mac after over ten years on Ubuntu.

Edit: reading through the comments I noticed Slackware 15 has been released back in February (SuSE was once based on SL). How in hell could've that not been a HN story?

openSUSE supports a whole bunch of desktop environments (including KDE and Gnome):

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Desktop_FAQ#How_to_choose_a...?

> no working kinetic scroll on the touchpad

This is an issue with libinput. libinput unlike the old synaptics driver, has no kinetic scrolling built into it and applications are left to implement that themselves. The way the synaptics driver did it, a flicked scroll gesture on the touch pad would generate numerous scroll events. This had some advantages; it worked in every program that accepted scroll events at all, and it worked the same in all of them. The downside is that applications couldn't distinguish those kinetic scroll events from user generated scroll events. So if you held down the control button while a kinetic scroll was in progress, you may find that firefox suddenly zoomed the document you were viewing.

With libinput, kinetic scrolling is left entirely to the application. It should therefore work in firefox, but won't work in most other applications. And when it does work, it is often inconsistent because different applications that do implement their own kinetic scrolling don't all have it configured in the same way.

The devs say libinput is better because synaptics was too old, crufty, too configurable with too many edge cases to test... but from a user perspective I think synpatics was better.

> The devs say libinput is better because synaptics was too old, crufty, too configurable with too many edge cases to test... but from a user perspective I think synpatics was better.

That has been the user story on the linux desktop since forever.

Gnome 2 -> 3

Xorg -> Wayland

Alsa -> Pulseaudio

Synaptics -> libinput

Every single time, it's better for the developer and removing user functionality and making life on the linux desktop more horrifying.

Oh and gtk4 font rendering is broken for anyone who doesn't have a 300 DPI monitor. The current implementation of antialiasing causes blur. Can't even fix it by using a bitmap font as a replacement as they are no longer supported since the removal of FreeType.

Sometimes one can't help but wonder if Red Hat is paid to sabotage the linux desktop and keep the OS firmly in the camp of server side.

So much this.

Maybe we can add containers for desktop apps which no end user wanted ever but might be easier for packaging apps running on every distro - except there are now snaps and flatpacks so back to square one with .deb and .rpm ;)

Meanwhile there have been exactly zero new F/OSS desktop apps for over a decade except IDEs and even those are mostly Electron-based. What a mess.

> Meanwhile there have been exactly zero new F/OSS desktop apps for over a decade except IDEs and even those are mostly Electron-based. What a mess.

Er, that's just objectively not true. Here's exactly one new FOSS desktop app: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion - I don't know how old it is, but it's a Matrix client and Matrix is only 8 years old so less than a decade.

> Alsa -> Pulseaudio

At least pipewire finally got it right, as far as I've experienced anyway.

> Sometimes one can't help but wonder if Red Hat is paid to sabotage the linux desktop and keep the OS firmly in the camp of server side.

The way it feels to me, Red Hat supports GNOME's continued existence because RHEL on workstations is something they want to exist at least on paper, but they have no real interest in making it a viable competitor to Windows.

Happy OpenSUSE user here.

Maybe it is my approach to personal computing devices, but I managed to break Ubuntu several times during upgrades. OpenSUSE tumbleweed just worked every time.

It also provides a more up to date gnome experience. I tried KDE on OpenSUSE too, but international input was broken.

Nothing negative to say about free OS. Very fast, very stable, supports dell laptop hardware out of box.

By international input, do you mean IME? If so, which one do you use? I find fcitx (fcitx5 now) to be much more usable than ibus.

Tumbleweed was the last distro I used for a PC before I switched to macOS back in 2015.

Back then, it was already better than any other distro in terms of balance of stability, usability, and being up-to-date. Most similar was Debian Testing, but OpenSUSE's Tumbleweed was way ahead in providing a stable environment.

I love using Opensuse mostly because it's simple and mainly YAST which makes the OS simple and fun to use.

I'm quite sure the stuff most people find useful in the distro is actually the most likely to be removed in future releases. E.g. YaST keeps getting smaller and smaller in scope; last victim was the Audio applet.

If they kill YaST, they pretty much kill openSUSE. In my opinion that is and always has been the key differentiator of SUSE.

I'm still annoyed that the YaST Font module got removed, while /etc/fonts/local.conf is easy enough to manage myself I liked having the visual confirmation of what I was doing.

As a person whitout internet( pre open suse era), my first linux for personal use was suse (before the opensuse) it was nice to have all deps in the cds, also for the time, compatible nvidia drivers, cedega worked like a charm for warcraft 3. Those where the times

I love openSUSE tumbleweed, use it since years as my main OS, but to be honest, all main distributions got it right. So openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc are all great distributions and you will have few problems to use it to fulfill your daily needs.

~10 years ago when I spoke with sys admins about OpenSUSE their feedback was basically: "Due to demand in the institute we have to support it but recommend everyone to stay very very far away from it as it's a security nightmare and in general hard to _properly_ maintain."

Is that still this way today? I mean even back then you had some people promoting it as grate thing, while basically everyone (I knew) with expertise evaluated it as terrible.

But then a lot of time passes, so things can be very different now.

Probably more to do with the opinions and preferences of those admins than anything to do with the distro. Sounds like they didn't know how to manage it, lacked the same visibility into it that they had with Windows or just didn't want to deal with it.

It was pretty much the best linux system administrator I have seen yet up to date. So I don't think so.

And there had been more then just one or two distros which have been beloved by their users but had serve security related issues in the past, too. Some fixed them and some didn't.

Glad to see this happening, I never used SUSE, but I always thought it would be a great Distro to go to.

For the curious, I use Slackware plus a BSD once in a while for testing Development objects.

For your interest, SuSE was once started as a Slackware clone with RPMs bolted on, together with YaST the system configuration tool.

I recently took OpenSUSE for a spin. Looks like a polished distribution with a lot going for it. Unfortunately, some of the packages I needed weren't there (not going to say which ones, to avoid going down that rabbit hole) but they were available for Debian, Fedora, and Arch. You're on your own when compiling software, so I moved on.

Did you look on https://software.opensuse.org/ ? There's a large community of packagers and lots of software is not in the main repo but still readily available and just as easy to install.

I'd be very curious to know what are those packages. But this is not surprising, OpenSUSE is less popular than Debian, Fedora and Arch.

``` You do not have access to linuxiac.com.

The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site. ```

That's weird.

Personally I don't use for these main reasons: - zypper is very slow, and unlike DNF there is no way to make it fast - docker doesn't offer an external/official repo for it, you can use Podman but you are stuck to the officially shipped version - support lifecycle is kind of weird

>- zypper is very slow, and unlike DNF there is no way to make it fast

Yes. Requests to the repo have high latency and downloads are done one at a time, so small packages download at a glacial pace because of all the overhead of setting up a new connection for each one.

I had to resort to maintaining a local repository that rsyncs from the repo mirrors daily.

>- docker doesn't offer an external/official repo for it

It's in oss already. You don't need another repo.

    Information for package docker:
    -------------------------------
    Repository     : @System
    Name           : docker
    Version        : 20.10.23_ce-2.2
    Arch           : x86_64
    Vendor         : openSUSE

>- support lifecycle is kind of weird

The docker version i s very out of date

Two months is not "very out of date", no.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/release-notes/20.10/

>20.10.23

>2023-01-19

And to be clear, the only newer release line than 20.x is 23.x, of which the first release 23.0.0 was on 2023-02-01

This is on leap? Or tumbleweed? Because I'm never going to use tumbleweed on a server

shrug just use Debian; it's like Ubuntu without canonical randomly breaking stuff

Last time I've tried (~month ago) I couldn't even install ufw+gufw which I think is a very simple and end user friendly app. Not in the official repo > add community repo > 1 click install fails because dependency not provided etc.

Debian/Fedora/Mint where is it. Probably Ubuntu too if you are okay with snap.

Growing popularity within the shrinking/plummeting usage of Linux desktop worldwide (nearing 1% of the global market, servers excluded) is nothing to brag about. If all these effing distros didn't multiply like rabbits and didn't compete with each other maybe people or companies would be more inclined to adopt linux

source? most sources I see put linux around 2-3%, growing actually. https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

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