It is going to be a steep learning curve without having a strange DE as well
Linux Peppermint works with xfce too and It came in two flavors, based in Debian and Devuan
Returning to openSuse
It works for 32 bits too. I did not choice it for my old acer for the hardware requirements. Thus Peppermint won
I have used Peppermint/Devuan… It meets my needs well.
It is much more of a minimalist distro than SUSE.
I just stumbled across a review of openSUSE Tumbleweed.
It is more positive than the one I read
The last line of the review may just sum it up.
If your preference is for KDE, rather than Gnome, this would be our pick of the bunch.
I wrote a review in this very forum when I started using openSUSE Tumbleweed last year. Still using it and loving it.
I only update once a week, there are no problems with that method.
If anyone has any other questions, I would be happy to answer them.
Jimmy’s review is here
I should probably talk about my more recent experience with openSUSE Tumbleweed.
Still love that it is a rolling release distro and I actually find it to be more stable than Ubuntu.
Codecs
I did have some problems with codecs at one point, funnily enough. Essentially, there are a couple ways to install non-free codecs on openSUSE. One way, which is the first option on the documentation for some reason is through a tool call opi (Open Build Service Package Installer). However, this tool is handled by someone who is not involved with openSUSE itself so sometimes the codecs expect packages that don’t match with the next version of Tumbleweed.
The solution is to use the Packman repo with Zypper, which will always stay up to date with whatever version of openSUSE you are running. This is helpful because there are 3 versions of openSUSE.
This is the guide for the codecs here, please follow option 2 or 3. Its not exactly hard to fix if you end up picking option one instead (especially since BTRFS makes it very easy to roll back to the previous working version), but save yourself the trouble.
Community
The community still is very great. If you use Facebook there is actually a very active openSUSE community there, but I don’t use it much. I personally know quite a few people near me who really like openSUSE, so that gives me an advantage when I need help (which hasn’t been too often, luckily).
There is also a discourse forum here. it is not the most active, but I also have never had to wait more than a day or two to get my questions answered.
There are also the mailing lists, which are also very active. These might not be the best if you are having trouble, but if you want to contribute or stay on top of openSUSE news these would be your best bet.
Updating
I know the existence of YaST is a bit distracting, but to be clear you do not need to use it at all. In fact, I think the only feature of YaST I have ever used was I used YaST Partitioner to make sure my partitions were correct after installation. I do agree it is a bit of a monster, but I can see the benefit in an enterprise setting.
It’s also a bit much as a GUI installer, because if you go with GNOME or KDE, they also come with their own GUI installers, which are much easier to use if you were going to go that route.
Finally, if you are running Tumbleweed, instead of a regular update with sudo zypper update or sudo zypper up you will want to run sudo zypper dup or if you really like typing sudo zypper dist-upgrade.
I don’t know what happened when @pdecker tried Tumbleweed, because when I try dup its usually once a week at most that is available (rare occasions I have seen twice in a week). I did just try sudo zypper up right now and I saw it had some updates when I just updated the other day, but this is not a dup upgrade. A dup upgrade is like a super-version of update. It will often include a lot of packages (for example, the other day I was a bit behind on updates and it had ~3000 packages^ to update), and if there is a kernel update it will include that as well.
Do note that if there is a new kernel version installed, it will suggest you restart to apply the kernel update. It does not force you to do this, but you cannot take advantage of the new kernel until you do so. So I usually try to plan my dup around a time I am going to turn off my computer anyway.
The Feel
I’ve been thinking about this recently, since I’ve tried EndeavourOS, Fedora and Solus on my laptop. All three of those distros worked fine, I have no complaints, but there is just something magical about openSUSE works. I am not sure I can really put it into words. The closest of all of them was definitely Solus, but even then it just didn’t feel as right to me as openSUSE Tumbleweed does.
^ I know 3000 is a lot. I do a lot of dev work on this machine, including stuff with containers, so I am installing stuff constantly. You will likely not have nearly as many updates in a single dup as I do. Usually it is much smaller that that, but it just depends.
Again Huge thanks Jimmy for this “second” review
It is in my schedule to use openSUSE Leap soon as I can. I am going to play with both
Thank You
I have tried open-SUSE Tumbleweed this year. It was actually pretty straightforward to install (has, in my opinion, the best installer), and it booted pretty fast. Yast and zypper were learned fast, and there are actually no „big“ reasons not to use it.
I use openSUSE when developing due to Yast and great container support, my podman‘s start fast. I triple-boot with Fedora and Arch with it, and Arch has the AUR, openSUSE has the OBS. Yeah only problem is Steam very slow startup, but that does not annoy me as much.
So it‘s worth a try, try it in a VM, get to know the basics, and then install it on real hardware, that‘s what I recommend.
A friend of mine has used OpenSuse Leap for a while for audio purposes. He had loads of trouble with it, especially seeing he needed to do some black magic to get his audio hardware to work properly. Also zypper is sloooooooooooooooow according to him when you pass a certain amount of packages and repositories. He was not happy with it. Unfortunately I was unable to help him, as his configuration was quite exotic and he needed to mess with ALSA to get stuff done. He went back to Windows.
Hello Xander
thanks for that feedback
Best!
He used a special (niche) audio devices. Some kind of a keyboard variation, used to make house music variations. He needed to do some pretty strange stuff with alsa, pulseaudio, and wine to get the thing working. The odds of people encountering that kind of complexity is very low, since the device is very niche and is quite expensive (about €1000).
I haven’t got much experience with opensuse’s zypper, but I do know it’s a wrapper around rpm (much like apt is a wrapper around dpkg). The guy needed quite a lot of external repositories and was in a pretty unique situation. He complained to me an update took forever (also my experience, for the three hours I used tumbleweed).