[HN Gopher] OpenSUSE Linux gains momentum
___________________________________________________________________
OpenSUSE Linux gains momentum
Author : jrepinc
Score : 152 points
Date : 2023-03-26 12:52 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (linuxiac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (linuxiac.com)
| InfamousRece wrote:
| 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...
| systematical wrote:
| 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.
| wankle wrote:
| 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.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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.
| dralley wrote:
| 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.
| wankle wrote:
| 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.
| fayten wrote:
| 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.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| smegsicle wrote:
| > Rustling RPMs
|
| fyi the term is actually "rassling", unless referring to
| stealing rpms from other ranchers
| JasonFruit wrote:
| That'll git ya a necktie party sure as shootin'.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| "Wrangling" is also acceptable
| danieldk wrote:
| But Mandrake Linux also used RPMs.
| mpol wrote:
| 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.
| ahepp wrote:
| Are RPMs structurally quite different from DEBs? Or was the
| problem that RPM tooling was buggy?
| petepete wrote:
| 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.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| 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.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| 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?
| T-A wrote:
| openSUSE supports a whole bunch of desktop environments
| (including KDE and Gnome):
|
| https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Desktop_FAQ#How_to_choose_a...
| ?
| stametseater wrote:
| > _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.
| zatni wrote:
| > 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.
| stametseater wrote:
| > _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.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| 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.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > 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.
| IronWolve wrote:
| 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.
| Multicomp wrote:
| 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.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| > 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.
| zokier wrote:
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| It cured my ED and my skin is clearing up so speak for yourself
| stametseater wrote:
| 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.
| mook wrote:
| 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/
| pxc wrote:
| 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| what are you calling the new school?
| pxc wrote:
| 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.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Nix probably?
| pxc wrote:
| 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).
| EntrePrescott wrote:
| 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.
| dathinab wrote:
| ~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.
| jm4 wrote:
| 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.
| t43562 wrote:
| 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.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Could be because people are looking for alternatives to CentOS.
|
| CentOS stream may not be compatible with some orgs.
| forinti wrote:
| Rocky and Alma seem like the natural successors to me, but I
| guess any distro is fine if it fits your needs.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| SUSE has been around for a long time and has always have had
| strong ties with the corporate world.
| waselighis wrote:
| 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.
| scns wrote:
| Sorry for the snark but snapper automatically snapshots when
| invoking zypper for updates, how much easier can it get?
| haolez wrote:
| 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.
| kingboss wrote:
| 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.
| haolez wrote:
| My point was about a desktop machine. You could access a
| cluster of Linux machines with NVIDIA cards from your AMD-
| based desktop.
| bachmeier wrote:
| 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.
| benjiweber wrote:
| 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.
| nativeit wrote:
| 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.
| j7f3 wrote:
| 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.
| psydvl wrote:
| 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/
| lockhouse wrote:
| 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.
| mpol wrote:
| 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.
| pxc wrote:
| 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.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > 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.
| haunter wrote:
| 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.
| gecko wrote:
| 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.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| 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).
| dev_daftly wrote:
| 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.
| jborean93 wrote:
| 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.
| brirec wrote:
| 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)
| pmorici wrote:
| 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.
| jehb wrote:
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > 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)?
| jzb wrote:
| 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?
| mcdonje wrote:
| This is a good observation and it could indeed be a driver.
| asmor wrote:
| 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.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| 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.
| tmtvl wrote:
| 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.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| 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.
| tete wrote:
| > some machines with no real issues
|
| I am really curious about the kinds of issues you encountered.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| 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.
| pxc wrote:
| > 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!
| scns wrote:
| For servers they have MicroOS, an immutable OS to host services
| in containers.
| wankle wrote:
| 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.
| avhception wrote:
| 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.
| pmontra wrote:
| That's why I moved to Debian 11 at end of 2022.
| troymc wrote:
| 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.
| ilyt wrote:
| 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..)
| _huayra_ wrote:
| 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!
| lockhouse wrote:
| 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.
| eikenberry wrote:
| +1
|
| 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.
| tintedfireglass wrote:
| I love using Opensuse mostly because it's simple and mainly YAST
| which makes the OS simple and fun to use.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| 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.
| lockhouse wrote:
| If they kill YaST, they pretty much kill openSUSE. In my
| opinion that is and always has been the key differentiator of
| SUSE.
| tmtvl wrote:
| 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.
| karasoft wrote:
| [dead]
| Nonhocapito wrote:
| 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
| blablablerg wrote:
| source? most sources I see put linux around 2-3%, growing
| actually. https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-
| market-sha...
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| 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.
| mikae1 wrote:
| But sadly no KDE spin...
| jacooper wrote:
| 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
| Arnavion wrote:
| >- 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
|
| ?
| jacooper wrote:
| The docker version i s very out of date
| Arnavion wrote:
| 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
| masenf wrote:
| 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.
| e12e wrote:
| 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...
| masenf wrote:
| 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.
| dizhn wrote:
| 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?
| masenf wrote:
| 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.
| pelasaco wrote:
| 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.
| ilyt wrote:
| _shrug_ just use Debian; it 's like Ubuntu without canonical
| randomly breaking stuff
| Yeri wrote:
| 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.
| virgulino wrote:
| 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
| veidr wrote:
| 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
| weberer wrote:
| https://archive.is/qkeN6
| jmclnx wrote:
| 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.
| sokz wrote:
| Access Denied for me here in India too. Looks like they set
| up to block by countries.
| jmclnx wrote:
| 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?).
| input_sh wrote:
| I doubt they're talking about SUSE blocking them, but the
| website that was submitted here (linuxiac.com).
| Xunjin wrote:
| 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.
| doodlesdev wrote:
| 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.
| larrysalibra wrote:
| Same problem - blocked in Thailand. The site owner probably
| configured blocking by country.
| tintedfireglass wrote:
| Blocked from India. the open internet is dead my
| friend......
| Yeri wrote:
| 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. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| jmclnx wrote:
| 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.
| jmclnx wrote:
| 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.
| mpol wrote:
| For your interest, SuSE was once started as a Slackware clone
| with RPMs bolted on, together with YaST the system
| configuration tool.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| 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.
| Proven wrote:
| [dead]
| cbcoutinho wrote:
| 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
| spyremeown wrote:
| ``` 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.
| illusiveman wrote:
| 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.
| neoyagami wrote:
| 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
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