I have been using Mint for about six months now and while I am not going to start distro hopping, I slowly want to start exploring the rest of Linux.
Originally I was looking at Arch based distros such as Manjaro and EndeavourOS, during which I found out Manjaro is somewhat pointless because you pretty much should not use the AUR on Manjaro or else you will break the system inevitably. EndeavourOS looked solid though.
However, I got a few suggestions regarding OpenSuSE Tumbleweed as a better alternative to Arch based distros and just wanted to know what are the pros and cons of OpenSuSE compared to Arch based distros from your experience?
I’ve been using OpenSuSE for decades, both for personal and professional purposes.
I can’t comment about usability because I’ve simply used it for so long I know all its quirks and so on. What I will say is the tumbleweed is very stable considering its a rolling release. That’s largely due to their automated testing platform. It’s got a feel of a work focused distribution like red hat rather than a home OS like Ubuntu. Never the less, I’d recommend it to anyone who asks.
I found out Manjaro is somewhat pointless because you pretty much should not use the AUR on Manjaro or else you will break the system inevitably.
I think perhaps you misunderstood?
You should not use AUR packages for critical stuff like kernel, drivers or system libraries. But that’s true on all Arch-derived distros. The reason is that AUR is mostly unverified stuff and can go bad at any time.
The other thing about AUR that’s indeed specific to Manjaro is that due to their delay in publishing Arch packages sometimes an installed AUR package can go out of sync and not work anymore when you update the regular packages, and you may not be able to fix it for a couple of days.
That’s happened once or twice to me over the last 3 years and it’s annoying but, again, it depends on what exactly was that thing that you installed from AUR. It if it’s not something essential, as it should, then it will just be a minor inconvenience.
While it may not cause problems often in practice, having your package sources be out of sync by default is just bad design.
Nothing in AUR is guaranteed in any way. It’s literally random people uploading random stuff and it’s accepted after the most minimal testing.
Ideally AUR maintainers should constantly update their packages to follow latest Arch but in practice only a fraction do it.
People who complain that AUR is not “in sync” with something are misguided. What it means is that until that moment they happened to use AUR packages that were frequently updated. It’s a happy coincidence. The illusion of “sync” could be broken when they step out to try Manjaro, but it can also be broken on Arch just as easily by using a less well-maintained AUR package.
Again, it all comes down to what AUR packages you are using. If it’s a package that’s promptly updated every time an Arch dependency moves, you’re obviously better off on Arch. If it’s not updated that frequently (which is the vast majority of them) it makes no difference if you use Arch or Manjaro/Garuda/Endeavour.
Originally I was looking at Arch based distros such as Manjaro and EndeavourOS, during which I found out Manjaro is somewhat pointless because you pretty much should not use the AUR on Manjaro or else you will break the system inevitably. EndeavourOS looked solid though.
I personally wouldn’t recommend Manjaro, they’ve some questionable decisions and even failed to do some basic things, like failing to renew their SSL certificate, which happened at least twice.
However, I got a few suggestions regarding openSuSE Tumbleweed as a better alternative to Arch based distros and just wanted to know what are the pros and cons of OpenSuSE compared to Arch based distros from your experience?
Well, the two aren’t all that different. openSUSE has an better installer, which offers even full disk encryption, automated partitioning for disks in BTRFS with backups enabled. One big plus I can see in openSUSE’s favour is YaST, the graphical utility for system configuration, and allows you to configure nearly everything in a GUI.
Arch, memes aside, is relatively stable in my experience, only having problems once or twice with Nvidia drivers. I think that Arch’s biggest advantage is the AUR. Also one big plus of it’s install method is that if you read the documentation during the install process, and try to understand it, you’ll get a much clearer picture of how a linux system works in the “backend”.
Both distros are rolling, and the speed that packages arrive in zypper (openSUSE’s package manager) vs pacman (Arch’s) is rather small in my opinion. Personally, I lean more towards openSUSE, but both are good.
Well, the two aren’t all that different. openSUSE has an better installer, which offers even full disk encryption, automated partitioning for disks in BTRFS with backups enabled.
If you want the above with Arch, the EndeavourOS installer also offers these features.
One big plus I can see in openSUSE’s favour is YaST, the graphical utility for system configuration, and allows you to configure nearly everything in a GUI.
It’s not widely known, but EndeavourOS also has a GUI manager for btrfs snapshots,
btrfs-assistant, that offers equivalent functionality to 'Suse.It doesn’t come pre-installed, but it’s pretty easy to setup.
What you said about YaST, I 100% agree with.
I distro hopped a lot.
Mained Manjaro for a while… but now that I’ve found OpenSUSE, I’m not going anywhere. The convenience and polish YaST has is unbelievable.
Tumbleweed has been on my main machine for 3 years now? I also have OpenSUSE “Kalpa” installed on my TV box, and Leap on a laptop.
I dabble in NixOS, but Tumbleweed is my true love.
I have been using OpenSuse for over a year now, and it’s solid. Had 1 minor issue with audio crackling where i needed to restart Pulseaudio, but that’s long gone now. Highly recommend. Had regular breakages with Manjaro, so wouldn’t touch it.
I’ve currently been running tumbleweed for the past 2 years, has been pretty solid.
I’ve tried out a couple distros and my takeaways are if you want stability, go with an LTS (leap, rocky, alma, devuan etc) and if you want newer packages on top of that you could use something like nixpkgs or build from source for the packages that aren’t there yet.
If you want the latest packages/you do gaming or your hardware is pretty new, a rolling release like arch/artix is probably your best bet.
I just prefer tumbleweed as it comes with some useful stuff preinstalled out of the box. For instance, if I’ve ever had a bad update I’ve always used snapper to roll back as its preconfigured when you use btrfs
why would you suggest someone use a rhel clone? They’re not exactly desktop distros
Any LTS is good for reliability. RHEL clones are pretty good just depends on what someone is looking for.
Edit:
For an actual reason, mainly for the length of the LTS as rocky and alma I believe have a 10 year LTS while Debian have a 5/6 year LTS (sorry if that’s wrong, haven’t checked the length of the LTS in a while)You are correct.
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I’m interested in hearing about this from others, too. I’m in the middle of finding the next distro for my work now that centos 7 is reaching EoL. OpenSuSE is looking appealing (maybe because it’s completely new to me), using leap of course, but I’ve setup tumbleweed in WSL and am planning to set it up to dual boot and use it as my primary OS. Based on what I know, it wouldn’t be “better” than Arch, just a different way of managing updates. Tumbleweed is all automated for packaging and preparing updates, so the same issues that happen with AUR could also creep in to tumbleweed (I assume). One of the prices to pay for bleeding edge rolling releases
I’m looking at switching the server base to OpenSuse Leap for the in-place upgrades. This is after over a decade of running RHEL clones.
I don’t have dependencies on anything RHEL specific, so the switch isn’t too bad.
The hardest part is FreeIPA which still isn’t in the repos, but that can live on CentOS since it’s easy enough to to setup a replica.
One thing I’ve found I dislike is how limited the installer is in partitioning disks. I like having multiple disks in my servers, and I can’t set them up in btrfs at install time like I want to.
Yeah, 3rd-party repos messing things up is a generic distro problem. Some repos are better about not conflicting then others. I’m planning on being pretty conservative with them when I finally switch a desktop to Tumbleweed.
One thing I’ve found I dislike is how limited the installer is in partitioning disks. I like having multiple disks in my servers, and I can’t set them up in btrfs at install time like I want to.
Interesting, my only experience with installing openSUSE so far has been doing AutoYaST installs, and that seems to handle multi-disk BTRFS gallantly.
FreeIPA (the server part) has also been a bit of a friction point for me as well, but they have a containerized version which has been working rather well in my own usage so far, so having it as a direct system package is less important.
I haven’t tried an autoyast install. These have been one off installs for testing.
Are you creating a multi-disk volume?
I’m creating two different btrfs volumes on two separate disks. I have a SATA SSD for root and a faster NVMe SSD for applications, home dirs, or whatever. The installer won’t let me set mount points for the volume or subvolumes on the NVMe, and I have to do that later.
Ah, two entirely separate BTRFS volumes on the disks?
I’ve not actually done that myself, but the disk configuration XML definitely supports it.Yeah. Two separate volumes on two different disks. Alright, I’ll have to check out autoyast.
The last thing for me would be ZFS support. 🫤 You haven’t happened to try that out have you?
Nope, I’m personally staying away from ZFS on Linux on any critical system (and I don’t really have enough personal hardware to have properly non-critical systems) until it has more proper support, don’t feel like being at the whim of out-of-kernel modules for such things.
Supposedly you can just install and use it though, it’s available in the filesystems repo at least.
ZFS being out of tree is annoying. I miss it when I’m not on FreeBSD.
It works well enough, especially with a stable kernel. Fedora and ZFS can be tricky with kernel upgrades, and I was wondering if Tumbleweed is the same. I figured ZFS and Leap would be similar to CentOS or Debian.
Don’t. That is to distro hop.
Yes, I am a long time openSUSE user (heck, I am a SUSE employee!), but the difference between various distros is truly minimal. Yes, openSUSE has Yast, but aside from that it is really very similar to any other distribution. Instead of spending time on distro hoping, just sit on your behind and learn to resolve your issues with your current distribution.
I feel almost obliged to ask: there are lot of packages in Tumbleweed that are not available in Leap. Will packages from Tumbleweed be added to Leap with the next release? I want to use a static release distro and I’m currently on NixOS. The only distros that have all the packages I need are Arch, NixOS and Tumbleweed.
Keep in mind that just because they said they’re a SuSE employee there’s a good chance they have nothing to do with OpenSuSE. SuSE the company has a much broader stroke.
Yes, I know, but one can hope.
I JUST installed Leap for the first time earlier this week and I’m trying to make it my DD, but I’m curious now. What kinds of packages are missing that I might be concerned with? I use this PC for both gaming and for work, so I went GNOME since I need GTK for so many things even though I prefer KDE.
All comments here say the same - that TW is great. And they’re right! But I want to give you a few contrapoints to all of them and why I don’t use it.
If you like rolling release distros, TW is the best.
The OpenQA checks for incompatibilities in all the packages, and if something goes wrong or doesn’t work as it should, snapper rollback saves your butt.
It’s a very very solid distro and I have great respect for the engineer-software-artists!
Here’s what I personally didn’t like (my own opinion/ experience):
- Zypper is pretty redundant for me, since the settings apps can do more nowadays. Still a handy tool
- Zypper is slow
- Huge updates. I don’t have a good internet connection and it takes ages to complete. And when it’s done, you refresh and there are already 5 petabytes more to download :D
- More bugs: sometimes, it feels like a testing ground for new software. There were never any breaking errors, but many papercuts. I prefer to wait a few weeks until those are ironed out.
- The installer sucks. I had to retry it many times until I got a system that I could work with.
- Doesn’t seem as polished sometimes. There are a few QOL things I just miss by default, like a friendly password promt box for your LUKS.
- Software availability: you have to use Flatpak more often
I personally recommend and love Fedora. It’s also very up-to-date, but not as bleeding edge as TW. It feels more polished and robust, and it has a bigger community with more support.
I started using Silverblue recently and I think I found my perfect distro! Maybe take a look into SB, it is really not as complicated or restricting as many people think.
I think you meant YaST at the first bullet point. And yes, Zypper is slow.
Still, I think that the updates and bugs are part of the bleeding edge rolling-release cycle, not a problem of only TW.
pros:
- very good defaults, btrfs with snapper integration like no other distro (i know of)
- up to date packages
- zypper is amazingly easy to use and understand (zypper dup, upgrades your whole system, one command done)
- if you need GUI tools to configure stuff, YAST
cons:
- worse documentation compared to Arch
- not the fastest packet manager
- a lot of unnecessary packages (not as lightweight)
- solutions for problems are not as widespread on the internet (a bit similar to first con)
- imo weird naming of official repos, also packman being almost required
- https://build.opensuse.org/ is kind of like AUR with automatic QC, but you have to add repos for each package which makes keeping track a hassle
Still if you want to hop around I think you HAVE to try Tumbleweed for an extended period of time, because you will come only to appreciate something like rolling release + seamless integration of snapper once you hit those road bumps. I also think arch is the way, be it in its vanilla form or something like endeavouros. But maybe you should gather some experience beforehand. Btw. I am using Tumbleweed on my personal (gaming) desktop for almost 10 years now. I am at a point where I want to switch, but at the same time feel so comfortable that I am not sure its worth the effort.
Tumbleweed has been amazing. No hiccups ever. Some packages that I like are sometimes missing, but that’s it.
OpenSUSE (Tumbleweed) is kinda like user friendly, corporate backed Arch but you will notice that software support is much worse. Can’t keep up with the AUR. Arch is easily one of the, if not the, best supported distros, rivaling Debian, Fedora and derivatives.
So it kinda depends on what you want to do, because you might lack some software on SUSE. Also distro hopping is fine, if you stop :D
OpenQA and BTRFS with Snapper by default w/ support in GRUB is the main selling point for most users
The lack of debug packages in Arch is what drove me away as a developer
OpenSUSE supports debuginfod which is so nice when developing locally
I’d argue Arch is designed to be easy for package management on x86. If that’s your use case, it is quite easy
The ability to rollback is indeed awesome. And it’s built-in. I think you can do it in Arch-based distros but requires additional config.
cries in apt
Landscape can undo software updates and it is a mystical experience.
I run Deb testing, in the spring a change in Pipewire broke sleep/suspend for me, the upgrade came along with 100 other package upgrades. It took FOREVER to roll back just the right packages to the point where everything worked again, 0/10 would not recommend.
My experience with openSuse Tumbleweed has been mostly great so far.
I’ve used linux the last 20+ years (Debian, Ubuntu, manjaro, elementary os, fedora and so on).
For me the best ones so far have been Debian and Ubuntu server edition (for servers), Linux mint and openSuse (for desktop use).
I tried openSuse because I didn’t want to upgrade my system every 6 months (for Ubuntu) nor every many years (for Debian). I like the idea of having a stable main desktop system which I can rely on and it just works. I’m hoping openSuse Tumbleweed is that system.
I’ve used primarily openSuse with KDE on my main machine the last year and I’ve had the folllowing issues:
- some VPN connections do not work but the same one does work without problems on Linux mint. (For example the Fritz-box VPN) I’m still researching this.
- most tutorials are made for Ubuntu and other distros, so you have to search a bit more to find answers. (I’ve written a few on my site) You need more time and knowledge to do some stuff on openSuse, because the defaults are more secure (or less permissive). For example sharing a folder on a network or adding a network printer means configuring the firewall rules, which on Linux mint, Ubuntu and many others is not required (which also means that the required ports are open and the required packages are pre installed).
What I’ve liked
- there defaults are more secure and that means I’ve learned what some apps need and I’ve understand a little bit how they work.
- zypper dup is great and I love having a rolling distribution. (I also love apt-get btw)
- I feel openSuse is more stable (as a desktop, I haven’t tried it on servers yet) although I don’t have any basis to say that. I have another machine with linux mint and I feel I have more problems with stability there. (Again, this is just a feeling)
