I wanted to use OpenSUSE on my Lenovo X1 Gen11 but it wouldn't install so had to fall back to Fedora, seems it's a common issue for many users. Be nice if you can investigate why users are experiencing this.
I agree with you about open suse tumbleweed,I was a long time windows user,but when I decided to use open suse tumbleweed I was sold on it,Windows has been getting worse and worse,with every new Windows distro I would get,Open Suse has never froze like Windows,I am extremely happy with it,I use it for Multimedia mostly,I have been able to get many multimedia apps that I can really use,like you I say open suse tumbleweed has to be my favorite also!
16:34 LOL Finally some love for openSUSE. Every openSUSE User knows deep in their heart, that Tumbleweed is one of the best Distros, but the community is usually very quiet about it and even recommends other Distros. It's the most anti elitism Distro I know. Most of the RUclipsrs are "The Face of Arch Linux"
What openSUSE champions over any other distro is visualization. YasT shows you everything: packages, repos, incoming updates. Not only that makes openSUSE unique but also noob friendly: if you can update windows or mac, you will find openSUSE right at home.
And ironically the worst thing about opensuse is zypper, the thing yast relies (well actuall yast uses libzypp, but kinda the same). I mean, after trying fedora dnf, with the parallel downloads, and waaaaay more features, there is no coming back.
Thank you for your work. I switched to Opensuse Tumbleweed thanks to your videos. And I think the Chameleon totally won me over. Snapper, Yast, Zypper I love everything about this lizard. Thx You. 🐧🦎🐧
I'm so happy this distro gets more time in the spotlight. I can agree with everything you said. It's rolling but stable, and even if it wasn't that ONE time... snapper is there to save you, no matter what. Every time I try something different (recently nix), I just come back to Tumbleweed and it feels like coming home. And the home feels like a comfy log cabin, snow slowly falling down in front of the windows, and you're sitting there with a nice warm cup of hot chocolate, besides a warm fire, wrapped up in the most fluffy blanket.
New Linux user (since June}. Tumbleweed with Hyprland and Plasma on notebook and desktop. It's an awesome experience. I tend to go to Hyprland by default, but Plasma is a fine DE. Thanks for beating the Tumbleweed drum.
If someone really wants the absolute bleeding edge, with the latest software releases for openSUSE, there is 'openSUSE Factory'. However, Tumbleweed is usually new enough for most users, and TW is stable precisely because it does get the benefit of testing from Factory. But, openSUSE has 4 different major release versions now, to accommodate the needs of every user. 'Leap' focuses on rock solid stability and shares packages with SUSE Linux Enterprise. Then there's 'Slowroll' now as well, the recently added slow rolling release, that rolls about every 2-3 months, which offers a kind of middle ground between Tumbleweed and Leap.
@@lohlundgamesNo problem. But, if you're referring to Factory, please do keep in mind that it's not really intended for day-to-day use, and is considered a testing release for experienced users. Just want to make sure I'm clear about exactly what it is, before someone rushes to install it, has some kind of problem, then wants to thank me for that as well lol. The software on Tumbleweed is typically less than 2 weeks old, after first getting tested on Factory. But, Factory is there, for those who want to test it and understand what to expect.
Factory is just one or two days ahead of Tumbleweed at any moment. People who want to help with testing+development use devel-projects where software matures before it gets sent to Factory.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma desktop is also my favourite OS+DE combo of all times. Really great job on making a very stable rolling release distro, since their packages go through basic QA before reaching users. And yes if by any chance anything goes wrong there is awesome BTRFS snapsots integration. Really great job!
I installed opensuse recently and I gotta say... I love yaml files. I really like the way they do package management. They have actual installers and its so damn refreshing to see that done so well on linux.
Opensuse actually has a testing environment to test the packages. Manjaro doesn’t. They just hold packages back in order to see if there was any major issue with arch with an update. I think the opensuse approach can be taken more seriously
It was 5.3 with KDE 1.0 in retail packaging with the >500 page handbook, I think 6/7 CDs. I paid around 70 German Marks for it. The package was very popular at our university bookstore back then, they had every new distribution on sale right after release.
Before the 'obs' existed, there was 'Packman', which is still a fantastic community repo for openSUSE to this very day, which new users don't always know about. So, I'm surprised it didn't even get a mention here. It definitely deserves a mention, at the very least, to help new users.
It’s mostly unnecessary these days and caused a lot of issues in the past. Update issues with opensuse are rare, but the couple I had all involved packman. Imho it’s always a weakness when you form a system with interlocked dependencies from two different sources managed by different teams. Packman tries its best to be compatible with opensuse, but opensuse doesn’t wait on packman if a new version in its repository fails to build for example. So if a new version A from opensuse depends on new version B from packman which fails to build then A will be broken and your system upgrade will fail leaving you with a half upgraded system in the worst case. Conversely if both A and B would be from the same source A would be held back until B builds successfully.
The reason Opensuse updates are so large is because unlike other rolling releases they rebuild all dependencies that an updated package uses .. which is great because sometimes all associated packages should be rebuilt.. this HEAVILY lends to Opensuses stability and one the main reasons things break over time in Arch because they update a package and toss it out and the dependencies don't get an update til they get a version update which is what tends to cause things to break in Arch.. TBH Arch needs to change their mentality to be more like Opensuse in this regard
Arch can roll stuff back with a few command lines, no? That's the whole reason why use the latest updates of their packages, isn't it? Genuine question btw, dabbling into Linux little by little
@@IfritBoi The point is when a dependency gets an update ALL packages that depend on it should get rebuilt.. Arch does NOT do this so. which doesn't cause issues all the time but it is one the main reasons Arch tends to break. If they did it by default then your comment would be pointless..
Whoa! I've been using openSUSE for more than a decade and my BIGGEST frustration is how frequently texlive packages get updated! I finally installed it locally rather than through the package manager. I've long wondered why *texlive* would get so many updates! This must be it!
Welcome to the Chameleon club brother. I played with a few distros in 1999 till 2003. Then decided to buy the box set of SuSE Linux Professional 9.2 in 2004. I wanted that huge book. I still have it, a nice relic to have. Ran it on my AMD Athlon 64. What a nice setup that was! Been with the SUSE family ever since. I use Tumbleweed on one of my Microsoft surfaces, the other is stock Microsoft W11😁 A few tweaks to get it working with the touch screen but it's amazing. I also have openSUSE Leap on another machine running in text mode (desktop environment disabled, but still there in case I want to startx) with all my docker containers for my Home Lab, I manage it locally via SSH from either my openSUSE Surface or my Microsoft Surface 😅 Solid as a rock! Enjoy!
It's funny saying that Arch is the wild west, because Arch people were going feral these last week as Plasma 6 didn't drop as an update for around a week. There were people going as far as switching to Testing just because they couldn't wait (and then Plasma 6 shipped itself with broken session buttons on its main menu, but then again this is just a regular day).
I LOOOOVE the OpenSUSE installer, no other came close! Man, the installer is the simplest part of the process. This distro is like a tattoo, it sticks with you, and then you start counting the years...
You can switch tumbleweed to "slowroll" very easy without reinstalling btw. It's basically tumbleweed but more tested for stability (the packages are tested more and only a couple weeks behind compared to the tumbleweed packages). You will discover even less problems with it.
I’ve been on Tumbleweed for about 6 months now. It took me a few days to get it setup like I wanted. I’m using it for home desktop on and media server for plex / jellyfin. 13th gen i7 and two gpu’s. Nvidia P2000 and a RX6700. All working great for what I want. The P2000 covers the transcoding for videos and the RX6700 covers my gaming needs. Can honestly say I’m very pleased with this setup and can’t see any reason for hopping to another one now. Wanted to try a “stable” rolling release and I think I found a perfect fit for my main home desktop.
Yup, I agree with everything in this video. I never was a distro hopper, and I hate reinstalling my OS, so I'm stoked to have found a home on Tumbleweed. Best distro I've ever used hands down, especially with KDE.
I just started listening to your podcast while at work. Ever since I started digging in to Linux I never heard of OpenSuse. I have been hoping around Linux distros for well over 5 years now and not 1 seemed fit for me. However ever since I switched to OpenSuse I feel like I finally found a distro that I can stick to. Thanks!
@manadecide Sorry you've been using Linux for 5 years and never heard of openSUSE? 😂 You really can't have been around much at all. I know it's bigger in Europe but still when KDE or a "complete" linux os comes up openSUSE is mentioned very often. Also distrowatch?
@@PremiumGerman When I first started with Linux I used Ubuntu for a few years. A buddy of mine told me about distros like Fedora, Arch, Linux Mint etc. I never even thought of searching the net to see what else was out there because I have enjoyed all the distros I have used. All that matters to me is now I can enjoy OpenSuse.
As a LONG time openSUSE user, you're preaching to the choir, Reverend. That being said, you are a much stronger advocate than I so I appreciate that. My difference is that I use the Leap version instead of the Tumbleweed. I definitely appreciate the rollback feature. I've had to use it a few times. Most of the other problems I've had were self-induced. I agree that zypper's performance sucks and they should fix that, especially for their enterprise clients. Otherwise, I've been solidly on openSUSE since 12.3, actually before but I had issues with the OS back then but not since 12.3.
I used openSUSe for seven years dual booting ( I had to be Windows-proficient for work- but the Linux was all me) and I'm about to go back to it in a VM. The mail machines at my office are on openSUSE. No problems, ever. Pitney Bowes keeps them up to date.
Recently installed openSuSe and had touchpad problems. Noticed almost all YAST dialog boxes had clear keyboard shortcut keys. Very appreciated, and old school. Suse was one of my first distros used, around 2004 or so. openSUSE is good and deserves more attention because suse is its OWN distro. It's not debian or red hat.
well i'm one of the people that you managed to convince to try tumbleweed lol. switched from void linux to tumbleweed a week ago. so far it has been a pretty good experience (although i use the gecko rolling distribution instead of pure tumbleweed, because i didn't like what tumbleweed does out of the box with patterns and reinstalling removed packages, and gecko takes care of that for me). everytime i switch distro though nixos is still in the back of my head, i really like the idea of a declaritive distro but so far i haven't commited to learning it yet. i'll probably spin it up in a vm soon and actually give it a try, see if i like it.
Thank you for the video. Lots of good info here. Now you got me curious to check out OpenSUSE and try to wrap my head around the Build Service you mentioned.
Hello from me as well, currently caught up in distro-hopping, but definitely openSUSE is a great-looking distribution, and for now, perhaps the only one that hasn't given me glitches in games under Linux (specifically targeting Diablo IV).
It's a good distro. I used it for a half a year last year and enjoyed it. I am at the moment back on Ubuntu and it has been pretty solid. I tend to prefer gnome, but when I got the KDE bug, openSuse was the distro I picked and it was pretty flawless and SNAPPER ROCKS. I don't know how many times I "messed around" with the system to see what I could do and snapper saved my butt. :D
There is EXCELLENT DOCUMENTATION available on this and THAT is one thing I love---- if I have that-- I can pretty much figure out whatever I need to do.
IMHO openSUSE Tumbleweed is the best rolling release by far! And one of the (if not the) best distributions for KDE Plasma - if you block KDE PIM and Akonadi server during installation… 😉
Many people forget to mention the community. Extremely knowledgeable and helpful people. I pretty much never see any form of toxicity on openSUSE chats/forums/subs. People generally care about this distribution and even often commit to bug reporting instead of complaining. It feels cozy, warm and at home.
I'm using a linux laptop (as intended and as ssh server for my tablet [for programming]) and a windows desktop, because I need certain software. When I wanted to use my laptop more often and had to install a (new) distro I thought alot about what to pick and came to the conclusion that opensuse tumbleweed could be a good desicion and never regretted it. It's simple to use, has up to date packages and most importantly it seems to be very stable. As a non-power user I just don't want to search for stuff online all the time, because something breaks or doesn't work as expected (except it's something I'm interested in and I want to modify it) . I want to get work done and don't want the pc itself to be my work.
I think you're trending along the lines of some other RUclips Linux guys. Arch is the best, some months later.. I finally left Arch, fedora is the best, never switching. Some months later, now Open Suse, it's the best.. You're just distro hopping like many of us. Nothing wrong with that. But it's tough to keep users trust when you are looking to build a user base. I would suggest you keep a solid foundation and build upon it. As someone who's watched a few of your videos now, I'm pretty sure you'll be switching again with the same words here shortly. It's the look you're putting out there.
Been a user of Windows since 95 and Until 11 and I've have had it so I decided to use Linux. I am a Beginner user of Linux. I use Fedora on my Medium Desktop Started on the 38th release and I use Linux Mint Cinnamon on my laptop since about a year now and so far I've been so happy with them! Now I've seen a lot of people mentioning OpenSUSE and I;m itching to give it a try on my Bigger PC. Thanks for all this info!!
Kinda new Linux user who got this far quickly: Arch: home and main distro. Does what I want and it's amazing, love it. Can't use forks of it for too long. Debian: easy to use but getting darker, don't wanna go there. Fedora: Easy to use. Good experience. Can't stay much time on it for some reason. OpenSUSE: new distro on the plate, giving it a fair chance. Slackware: That old distro I wish to give it a try some day.
I started my Suse history with Suse 7.1 ( long time ago ) and have bin on and off the distro over the years ( mostly on ) Now I'm on Tumbelweed Slowroll on my main computer.
FYI at around 16:34 to 16:39 there is an overlay of voices and it's hard to hear what you're saying. I have used OpenSUSE on and off for like 3 or 4 years now and it used to have breakages for me on the odd update (again, Tumbleweed) however this most recent bout of a year or so has been very good with no breakages. OpenSUSE is the distro that I prefer mostly even if YAST looks like ASST (lol), although Pop!OS is actually pretty good in the tests I have done.
The problem of OBS and other non-AUR repositories is that you have no guarantee that the package contains what it says on the tin. You trust root access to your machine to a random dude that uploaded the package. In AUR, you can read built script, and most of them boil down to three meaningful lines, and be sure that the software came from its supposed developer's web page, excluding the uploader to AUR from the trust chain completely.
I agree with you that OpenSUSE is the best (for my needs). I've tested many distros and keep coming back to Open SUSE. It just feels right and works right for me. An excellent operating system all around, in my view. And I've been testing Linus distros for a number of years. Thanks for the channel and the videos.
3:35 Not openSUSE is a rolling release but one of its versions, called Tumbleweed. Leap is on a fixed release cycle on the other hand. And then, they have introduced Slowroll recently, which is between TW and Leap in regards to update cycles.
Pacman is so much faster than zypper, zypper has no parallel downloading, and installs a bit slow. It is more feature complete but speed is what matters at the end of the day
2:00 Fedora may use BTRFS, but they don't make use of BTRFS snapshots by default. The closest thing they have is the ability to boot using an old kernel. Silverblue does have something similar to BTRFS snapshots which lets you rollback to old system states, but it's more powerful since it's more anti-hysteresis and lets you boot rollback to a version you never even had installed on your system. And NixOS goes even further than Silverblue, although it isn't as friendly to use as Silverblue.
Im running Tumbleweed as me second distro and I really want to like it. But combinatination of small repos and the incredible slow zypper. I'm just not quite gelling with it even though I want to. I like the fact that Tumbleweed is rolling yet stable.
generally its the kernel which actually causes issues for me, while the fix which i go is booting up in the linux rescue kernel besides openSUSE has been really stable Besides my favorite distro would be openSUSE or Fedora Silverblue
Opensuse was one of my hops and was nice and one I strongly considered stayng with. So many people, including Matt on this video, say Arch can break or is unstable. I have never felt it on Arch. The terms stable and unstable to create a false sense of expectation. Arch has to be the most stable experience I've ever had, more than Mint, more than Mac. Minimalism and deliberation in my OS is what has given this truly flawless experience. And... anything compared to Windows is stable.
OpenSUSE has been my go-to for nearly a year now, and I've only *kinda* missed Nobara, who made it super easy to tweak the RGB my PC came with. But YaST saved my sorry butt once or twice, and makes it so danged convenient to install things I need for dev.
Getting openSUSE installed these days is a walk in the park compared to S.u.S.E. Linux back in the days of single digit release versions. openSUSE got live ISOs available as well for trying it out before installing to disc.
My time on Opensuse Tumbleweed was good, but having an old Mac , drivers were difficult and the standard Opensuse I could not install. Gecko Linux was no problem, installed first time. Loved zypper even though it was slow. I am building a spare parts computer, I may make it a lizard machine
Been using suse since ages now. Can't even remember. Either 8.1 or 9.1. it always was miles ahead of its competition and it still is. Perhaps having a few gaming yast patterns in it might be just the thing to convince people.
What about community support? Are the mods arrogant? How easy is it to say, install a network wifi printer/scanner? I liked Silverblue, but SB restricts flatpak access to packages like Evolution. These are my concerns. I subscribed!
My OpenSuse is OpenSuse kalpa. Tumbleweed is the rolling release. I daily drive both Nixos rolling and OpenSuse kalpa long before Tyler switched to Nixos and Matt switched to OpenSuse tumbleweed btw.
I'm convinced. Been daily driving Debian 12 as my first Linux distro (didn't follow the Linux Mint / [insert other beginner distro here]) and once I got everything configured as I wanted it, yeah I mean it's definitely Debian lol, no issues. But I always felt like I was missing out being the old geezer running Debian. If I want to combine stability with a rolling release, I think the next logical step would be either Fedora or OpenSUSE. I felt like jumping on the Red Hat hate train for no reason so OpenSUSE it is boys, wish me luck tomorrow x)
I been using Slowroll on my desktop and laptop. I know the stability of the OpenQA system but I don't need the most uptodate packages but can't go with Leap because of how outofdate of everything. BTW Slowroll is experimental but it suppose to be between TW and Leap
@alexstone691 You get one big update every month sometime after two months. Other than that, the updates are mostly security updates that are bellow 50Mb at best.
Or he wants a rolling release that has a different release philosophy to that of arch etc. Namely including the latest stable release of a package as opposed to the latest release of a package. There is a difference... I actually walked away from debian 20-odd years ago because testing was shipping an unstable/experimental version of gcc that had a broken c++ compiler, rather than the (working) version that the gcc project had marked as the latest stable release.
After hopping round a lot over the last few years I'm sticking with Debian testing, it's got newer packages than stable but not so much newer that things break, I love Void also, but it has a tiny amount of packages in it's repositories compared to Debian
Same. I've had the same rolling Debian testing release installed for over 10 years at this point with very few issues. It's even been copied from one drive to another and survived at least one full computer rebuild. I'd also second that to Void. I usually have a chroot or container of it that I play around with when I have a bit of time.
Hey Matt, I've been lurker for a few months and have been listening to your podcasts regularly on spotify. Really enjoying your content as a new-ish linux user. If you see this, or to anyone else that knows, what KDE theme are you using? I was using Andromeda KDE prior to 6.0, but whatever you are using looks gorgeous. Also, what icons are those? Keep up the great work!
I really liked some features opensuse provides but at the same time some things annoyed the hell out of me - There is rescue mode in iso file with script that automatically mounts your system so you could repair things - The installer which most people don't like, while it was a bit confusing it provides the overview before beginning the installation which i love as it shows all the options set Things i hate - zypper is meh the plasma widget worked better for me most of time - tumbleweed updates are HUGE, it took 2 hours to update my laptop with an i3 which is too much IMO
Tumbleweed is also available for installation in WSL and it's great because of fresh packages and only running 5 processes when you open a shell. Requires a bit more research for some stuff than Ubuntu (like how TF do I get bash manual installed) but it's great for development on current versions.
Been using 15.5 Leap as a daily driver for a while (have used TW previously) and it's great. Normally I run an XFCE version but Plasma has been working just as well honestly. Infact, Plasma gave me issues on Debian often but not on Leap?
Tumbleweed was my favourite distro until I discovered nixos, though I recently had an issue with tumbleweed on my old laptop, I had xfce installed, but decided to try mate, so I installed the mate pattern and restarted, but it wouldn't login, so I tried gdm, same problem, then I tried sddm, same problem, so I logged into xfce and did a zypper dup, it downloaded 1.8G of packages and when it was almost finished installing them the xserver crashed and booted me out to a tty, I figured the update must have finished so I rebooted, but it rebooted to a tty, I tired to run zypper but zypper wouldn't run because of some missing rpm or something, so my system was broken, if it was installed on btrfs I could have booted into another snapshot, but it wasn't because I've found that btrfs doesn't perform very well on low end laptops, so instead I tried mate on my main system which runs on nixos, I changed one word in the config and did a rebuild, I restarted and logged into mate, and thought to myself, well that was easy.
I'm not a Linux expert by any means but I think Fedora has a great balance between being up to date and being stable too, with rpm being widely supported. I'm not sure what problems you have with it but I've found very few. As a gamer I find it to be a great distro.
package availability is the biggest reason I want to switch from fedora. I can't though because I'm in the middle of a semester and can't risk breakages from changing
I'm probably going to have to move from Arch to OpenSuSE at some point in future. I need the professional toolset for my work to be provided, supported and maintained by a company like Suse. Currently i do get the same tools available on Arch of course, but it's not the same thing compared to when they are provided with additional support and version selections maintained by a company.
Can i install and use normally DNF instead of Zypper? Forgive my reason but i have done commits to the DNF repo and it kinda is my baby...Also, would you say Zypper is better?
I'm also on Mastodon, where I toot about Linux and all sorts of things. Give me a follow: fosstodon.org/@thelinuxcast
na i use bash
On the install thing I had issues doing an install with updates from repos. Doing a mostly offline install without the repos worked just fine.
Many thanks for appreciation!
parallel downloading when?
I wanted to use OpenSUSE on my Lenovo X1 Gen11 but it wouldn't install so had to fall back to Fedora, seems it's a common issue for many users. Be nice if you can investigate why users are experiencing this.
WE LOVE YOU
My potato can run OpenSUSE
I agree with you about open suse tumbleweed,I was a long time windows user,but when I decided to use open suse tumbleweed I was sold on it,Windows has been getting worse and worse,with every new Windows distro I would get,Open Suse has never froze like Windows,I am extremely happy with it,I use it for Multimedia mostly,I have been able to get many multimedia apps that I can really use,like you I say open suse tumbleweed has to be my favorite also!
16:34 LOL
Finally some love for openSUSE. Every openSUSE User knows deep in their heart, that Tumbleweed is one of the best Distros, but the community is usually very quiet about it and even recommends other Distros. It's the most anti elitism Distro I know.
Most of the RUclipsrs are "The Face of Arch Linux"
What openSUSE champions over any other distro is visualization. YasT shows you everything: packages, repos, incoming updates. Not only that makes openSUSE unique but also noob friendly: if you can update windows or mac, you will find openSUSE right at home.
I like openSUSE, but men…YasT is a big Ui mess😄
@@danilarosmess? Do you prefer the terminal version, perhaps?
I run openSUSE with YasT stripped out. I feel its bloat, but a nice helper for new to linux users as I was when I first tried it.
@@sitaroartworksis a mess and dated. Just my opinion. If you like it cool! Just not for me🙂
And ironically the worst thing about opensuse is zypper, the thing yast relies (well actuall yast uses libzypp, but kinda the same).
I mean, after trying fedora dnf, with the parallel downloads, and waaaaay more features, there is no coming back.
Switched to Tumbleweed about 7 years ago and have not looked back.
Thank you for your work.
I switched to Opensuse Tumbleweed thanks to your videos. And I think the Chameleon totally won me over. Snapper, Yast, Zypper I love everything about this lizard.
Thx You. 🐧🦎🐧
I'm convinced, here we hop again
haha
lol
I'm so happy this distro gets more time in the spotlight. I can agree with everything you said. It's rolling but stable, and even if it wasn't that ONE time... snapper is there to save you, no matter what. Every time I try something different (recently nix), I just come back to Tumbleweed and it feels like coming home. And the home feels like a comfy log cabin, snow slowly falling down in front of the windows, and you're sitting there with a nice warm cup of hot chocolate, besides a warm fire, wrapped up in the most fluffy blanket.
New Linux user (since June}. Tumbleweed with Hyprland and Plasma on notebook and desktop. It's an awesome experience. I tend to go to Hyprland by default, but Plasma is a fine DE. Thanks for beating the Tumbleweed drum.
If someone really wants the absolute bleeding edge, with the latest software releases for openSUSE, there is 'openSUSE Factory'. However, Tumbleweed is usually new enough for most users, and TW is stable precisely because it does get the benefit of testing from Factory. But, openSUSE has 4 different major release versions now, to accommodate the needs of every user. 'Leap' focuses on rock solid stability and shares packages with SUSE Linux Enterprise. Then there's 'Slowroll' now as well, the recently added slow rolling release, that rolls about every 2-3 months, which offers a kind of middle ground between Tumbleweed and Leap.
Didn’t know that! Thanks!
@@lohlundgamesNo problem. But, if you're referring to Factory, please do keep in mind that it's not really intended for day-to-day use, and is considered a testing release for experienced users. Just want to make sure I'm clear about exactly what it is, before someone rushes to install it, has some kind of problem, then wants to thank me for that as well lol. The software on Tumbleweed is typically less than 2 weeks old, after first getting tested on Factory. But, Factory is there, for those who want to test it and understand what to expect.
Factory is just one or two days ahead of Tumbleweed at any moment. People who want to help with testing+development use devel-projects where software matures before it gets sent to Factory.
Thank you, I'm opensuser. I still play around with void and artix, but Tumbleweed is my fast solid home.
I think I'll have to give it a try...
I shall now refer to myself as an "opensuser"
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma desktop is also my favourite OS+DE combo of all times. Really great job on making a very stable rolling release distro, since their packages go through basic QA before reaching users. And yes if by any chance anything goes wrong there is awesome BTRFS snapsots integration. Really great job!
My first distro was SuSE 6.1 on a K6-200 back in the late 90's.
I remember these days! Getting the iso from a Linux Magazine
@@wyfyj I bought mine at Best Buy. I live in the country and dialup was horrible so 6.1 came with like every package.
Same! I think mine came with 6 DVDs in a green box
I installed opensuse recently and I gotta say... I love yaml files. I really like the way they do package management. They have actual installers and its so damn refreshing to see that done so well on linux.
Opensuse actually has a testing environment to test the packages. Manjaro doesn’t. They just hold packages back in order to see if there was any major issue with arch with an update. I think the opensuse approach can be taken more seriously
Arch is Manjaro's testing :)
I bought a copy of Suse with a nice Case and a printed manual back in the 90s. Good old days…
Did you get the SLED? How much did it cost?
It was 5.3 with KDE 1.0 in retail packaging with the >500 page handbook, I think 6/7 CDs. I paid around 70 German Marks for it. The package was very popular at our university bookstore back then, they had every new distribution on sale right after release.
Before the 'obs' existed, there was 'Packman', which is still a fantastic community repo for openSUSE to this very day, which new users don't always know about. So, I'm surprised it didn't even get a mention here. It definitely deserves a mention, at the very least, to help new users.
I come from Arch and I've been struggling with package availability. So I will definitely look into this.
@@captgeoff0713You've been struggling with package availability on openSUSE or Arch?
Everything in Tumbleweed is perfect, I just wish for more packages... but OBS exists + distrobox.
It’s mostly unnecessary these days and caused a lot of issues in the past. Update issues with opensuse are rare, but the couple I had all involved packman. Imho it’s always a weakness when you form a system with interlocked dependencies from two different sources managed by different teams. Packman tries its best to be compatible with opensuse, but opensuse doesn’t wait on packman if a new version in its repository fails to build for example. So if a new version A from opensuse depends on new version B from packman which fails to build then A will be broken and your system upgrade will fail leaving you with a half upgraded system in the worst case. Conversely if both A and B would be from the same source A would be held back until B builds successfully.
The reason Opensuse updates are so large is because unlike other rolling releases they rebuild all dependencies that an updated package uses .. which is great because sometimes all associated packages should be rebuilt.. this HEAVILY lends to Opensuses stability and one the main reasons things break over time in Arch because they update a package and toss it out and the dependencies don't get an update til they get a version update which is what tends to cause things to break in Arch.. TBH Arch needs to change their mentality to be more like Opensuse in this regard
Void does the same thing that side does
Arch can roll stuff back with a few command lines, no? That's the whole reason why use the latest updates of their packages, isn't it? Genuine question btw, dabbling into Linux little by little
@@IfritBoi The point is when a dependency gets an update ALL packages that depend on it should get rebuilt.. Arch does NOT do this so. which doesn't cause issues all the time but it is one the main reasons Arch tends to break. If they did it by default then your comment would be pointless..
@@tohur That makes more sense. Arch really does need to take an example from OpenSUSE then
Whoa! I've been using openSUSE for more than a decade and my BIGGEST frustration is how frequently texlive packages get updated! I finally installed it locally rather than through the package manager. I've long wondered why *texlive* would get so many updates! This must be it!
Welcome to the Chameleon club brother. I played with a few distros in 1999 till 2003. Then decided to buy the box set of SuSE Linux Professional 9.2 in 2004. I wanted that huge book. I still have it, a nice relic to have. Ran it on my AMD Athlon 64. What a nice setup that was! Been with the SUSE family ever since. I use Tumbleweed on one of my Microsoft surfaces, the other is stock Microsoft W11😁 A few tweaks to get it working with the touch screen but it's amazing. I also have openSUSE Leap on another machine running in text mode (desktop environment disabled, but still there in case I want to startx) with all my docker containers for my Home Lab, I manage it locally via SSH from either my openSUSE Surface or my Microsoft Surface 😅 Solid as a rock! Enjoy!
It's funny saying that Arch is the wild west, because Arch people were going feral these last week as Plasma 6 didn't drop as an update for around a week. There were people going as far as switching to Testing just because they couldn't wait (and then Plasma 6 shipped itself with broken session buttons on its main menu, but then again this is just a regular day).
I LOOOOVE the OpenSUSE installer, no other came close! Man, the installer is the simplest part of the process. This distro is like a tattoo, it sticks with you, and then you start counting the years...
Installed openSUSE Tumbleweed a few weeks ago. I had some problems with it but have not managed to break it. Awesome distro, very relaxing
You can switch tumbleweed to "slowroll" very easy without reinstalling btw. It's basically tumbleweed but more tested for stability (the packages are tested more and only a couple weeks behind compared to the tumbleweed packages).
You will discover even less problems with it.
I’ve been on Tumbleweed for about 6 months now. It took me a few days to get it setup like I wanted. I’m using it for home desktop on and media server for plex / jellyfin. 13th gen i7 and two gpu’s. Nvidia P2000 and a RX6700. All working great for what I want. The P2000 covers the transcoding for videos and the RX6700 covers my gaming needs.
Can honestly say I’m very pleased with this setup and can’t see any reason for hopping to another one now. Wanted to try a “stable” rolling release and I think I found a perfect fit for my main home desktop.
Yup, I agree with everything in this video. I never was a distro hopper, and I hate reinstalling my OS, so I'm stoked to have found a home on Tumbleweed. Best distro I've ever used hands down, especially with KDE.
I just started listening to your podcast while at work. Ever since I started digging in to Linux I never heard of OpenSuse. I have been hoping around Linux distros for well over 5 years now and not 1 seemed fit for me. However ever since I switched to OpenSuse I feel like I finally found a distro that I can stick to. Thanks!
@manadecide Sorry you've been using Linux for 5 years and never heard of openSUSE? 😂 You really can't have been around much at all. I know it's bigger in Europe but still when KDE or a "complete" linux os comes up openSUSE is mentioned very often. Also distrowatch?
@@PremiumGerman When I first started with Linux I used Ubuntu for a few years. A buddy of mine told me about distros like Fedora, Arch, Linux Mint etc.
I never even thought of searching the net to see what else was out there because I have enjoyed all the distros I have used. All that matters to me is now I can enjoy OpenSuse.
You convinced me to switch to Opensuse and i haven't been disappointed. Keep up the great work!
As a LONG time openSUSE user, you're preaching to the choir, Reverend. That being said, you are a much stronger advocate than I so I appreciate that. My difference is that I use the Leap version instead of the Tumbleweed. I definitely appreciate the rollback feature. I've had to use it a few times. Most of the other problems I've had were self-induced. I agree that zypper's performance sucks and they should fix that, especially for their enterprise clients. Otherwise, I've been solidly on openSUSE since 12.3, actually before but I had issues with the OS back then but not since 12.3.
Sorry about the glitch at the end.
Sht happens🤷
Good video, really enjoyed it!
I used openSUSe for seven years dual booting ( I had to be Windows-proficient for work- but the Linux was all me) and I'm about to go back to it in a VM. The mail machines at my office are on openSUSE. No problems, ever. Pitney Bowes keeps them up to date.
Recently installed openSuSe and had touchpad problems. Noticed almost all YAST dialog boxes had clear keyboard shortcut keys. Very appreciated, and old school. Suse was one of my first distros used, around 2004 or so.
openSUSE is good and deserves more attention because suse is its OWN distro. It's not debian or red hat.
@@htx80nerd I might be dreaming but I think I heard that it was built on slackware.
well i'm one of the people that you managed to convince to try tumbleweed lol. switched from void linux to tumbleweed a week ago. so far it has been a pretty good experience (although i use the gecko rolling distribution instead of pure tumbleweed, because i didn't like what tumbleweed does out of the box with patterns and reinstalling removed packages, and gecko takes care of that for me). everytime i switch distro though nixos is still in the back of my head, i really like the idea of a declaritive distro but so far i haven't commited to learning it yet. i'll probably spin it up in a vm soon and actually give it a try, see if i like it.
16:33 some glitches there Matt
That's just how Matt sounds 😂
Yeah, not sure what happened there. At least it wasn't the whole video!
Just communicating with his eldritch masters. Nothing to see.
Installed Tumbleweed more than 5 years on my everyday work laptop (a Thinkpad). It has been rolling ever since and still incredible.
How's PLASMA 6 ON IT
This content is so relevant if you are becoming a sysadmin. Particularly the segment about btrfs and snapshots.
Thank you for the video. Lots of good info here. Now you got me curious to check out OpenSUSE and try to wrap my head around the Build Service you mentioned.
Hello from me as well, currently caught up in distro-hopping, but definitely openSUSE is a great-looking distribution, and for now, perhaps the only one that hasn't given me glitches in games under Linux (specifically targeting Diablo IV).
It's a good distro. I used it for a half a year last year and enjoyed it. I am at the moment back on Ubuntu and it has been pretty solid. I tend to prefer gnome, but when I got the KDE bug, openSuse was the distro I picked and it was pretty flawless and SNAPPER ROCKS. I don't know how many times I "messed around" with the system to see what I could do and snapper saved my butt. :D
There is EXCELLENT DOCUMENTATION available on this and THAT is one thing I love---- if I have that-- I can pretty much figure out whatever I need to do.
IMHO openSUSE Tumbleweed is the best rolling release by far!
And one of the (if not the) best distributions for KDE Plasma - if you block KDE PIM and Akonadi server during installation… 😉
Many people forget to mention the community. Extremely knowledgeable and helpful people. I pretty much never see any form of toxicity on openSUSE chats/forums/subs. People generally care about this distribution and even often commit to bug reporting instead of complaining. It feels cozy, warm and at home.
I'm using a linux laptop (as intended and as ssh server for my tablet [for programming]) and a windows desktop, because I need certain software.
When I wanted to use my laptop more often and had to install a (new) distro I thought alot about what to pick and came to the conclusion that opensuse tumbleweed could be a good desicion and never regretted it. It's simple to use, has up to date packages and most importantly it seems to be very stable. As a non-power user I just don't want to search for stuff online all the time, because something breaks or doesn't work as expected (except it's something I'm interested in and I want to modify it) . I want to get work done and don't want the pc itself to be my work.
I think you're trending along the lines of some other RUclips Linux guys. Arch is the best, some months later.. I finally left Arch, fedora is the best, never switching. Some months later, now Open Suse, it's the best..
You're just distro hopping like many of us. Nothing wrong with that. But it's tough to keep users trust when you are looking to build a user base. I would suggest you keep a solid foundation and build upon it. As someone who's watched a few of your videos now, I'm pretty sure you'll be switching again with the same words here shortly. It's the look you're putting out there.
Been a user of Windows since 95 and Until 11 and I've have had it so I decided to use Linux. I am a Beginner user of Linux. I use Fedora on my Medium Desktop Started on the 38th release and I use Linux Mint Cinnamon on my laptop since about a year now and so far I've been so happy with them! Now I've seen a lot of people mentioning OpenSUSE and I;m itching to give it a try on my Bigger PC. Thanks for all this info!!
Get Gecko. It's based on OpenSUSE, but with the necessary codecs, and not only.
There is no other Distro that gets a new Gnome version as fast as openSUSE Tumbleweed. 1 to 3 Days usually. It crazy. And stable as a rock.
Kinda new Linux user who got this far quickly:
Arch: home and main distro. Does what I want and it's amazing, love it. Can't use forks of it for too long.
Debian: easy to use but getting darker, don't wanna go there.
Fedora: Easy to use. Good experience. Can't stay much time on it for some reason.
OpenSUSE: new distro on the plate, giving it a fair chance.
Slackware: That old distro I wish to give it a try some day.
I started my Suse history with Suse 7.1 ( long time ago ) and have bin on and off the distro over the years ( mostly on ) Now I'm on Tumbelweed Slowroll on my main computer.
openSUSE/Tumbleweed is the sleeper distro, get in on the ground floor is what I say. I love it personally.
Goodbye the Angry Birds poster 🫡 I will miss you in the background
You coaxed me into installing it on my daily use machine. I like it a lot.
FYI at around 16:34 to 16:39 there is an overlay of voices and it's hard to hear what you're saying.
I have used OpenSUSE on and off for like 3 or 4 years now and it used to have breakages for me on the odd update (again, Tumbleweed) however this most recent bout of a year or so has been very good with no breakages. OpenSUSE is the distro that I prefer mostly even if YAST looks like ASST (lol), although Pop!OS is actually pretty good in the tests I have done.
The problem of OBS and other non-AUR repositories is that you have no guarantee that the package contains what it says on the tin. You trust root access to your machine to a random dude that uploaded the package. In AUR, you can read built script, and most of them boil down to three meaningful lines, and be sure that the software came from its supposed developer's web page, excluding the uploader to AUR from the trust chain completely.
You can also review on OBS easily any user package RPM .spec file as well.
I agree with you that OpenSUSE is the best (for my needs). I've tested many distros and keep coming back to Open SUSE. It just feels right and works right for me. An excellent operating system all around, in my view. And I've been testing Linus distros for a number of years. Thanks for the channel and the videos.
3:35 Not openSUSE is a rolling release but one of its versions, called Tumbleweed. Leap is on a fixed release cycle on the other hand.
And then, they have introduced Slowroll recently, which is between TW and Leap in regards to update cycles.
I can't leave Arch pacman... nuff said...
Pacman is so much faster than zypper, zypper has no parallel downloading, and installs a bit slow.
It is more feature complete but speed is what matters at the end of the day
2:00 Fedora may use BTRFS, but they don't make use of BTRFS snapshots by default. The closest thing they have is the ability to boot using an old kernel. Silverblue does have something similar to BTRFS snapshots which lets you rollback to old system states, but it's more powerful since it's more anti-hysteresis and lets you boot rollback to a version you never even had installed on your system. And NixOS goes even further than Silverblue, although it isn't as friendly to use as Silverblue.
Im running Tumbleweed as me second distro and I really want to like it. But combinatination of small repos and the incredible slow zypper. I'm just not quite gelling with it even though I want to. I like the fact that Tumbleweed is rolling yet stable.
What other distro do you use?
Currently Manjaro. Also played around with other Arch based distros and also NixOS
Once this challenge is up you gotta try a BSD
Thank you for all reporting 😊
generally its the kernel which actually causes issues for me,
while the fix which i go is booting up in the linux rescue kernel
besides openSUSE has been really stable
Besides my favorite distro would be openSUSE or Fedora Silverblue
Opensuse was one of my hops and was nice and one I strongly considered stayng with. So many people, including Matt on this video, say Arch can break or is unstable. I have never felt it on Arch. The terms stable and unstable to create a false sense of expectation. Arch has to be the most stable experience I've ever had, more than Mint, more than Mac. Minimalism and deliberation in my OS is what has given this truly flawless experience. And... anything compared to Windows is stable.
OpenSUSE has been my go-to for nearly a year now, and I've only *kinda* missed Nobara, who made it super easy to tweak the RGB my PC came with. But YaST saved my sorry butt once or twice, and makes it so danged convenient to install things I need for dev.
Getting openSUSE installed these days is a walk in the park compared to S.u.S.E. Linux back in the days of single digit release versions.
openSUSE got live ISOs available as well for trying it out before installing to disc.
My time on Opensuse Tumbleweed was good, but having an old Mac , drivers were difficult and the standard Opensuse I could not install. Gecko Linux was no problem, installed first time. Loved zypper even though it was slow. I am building a spare parts computer, I may make it a lizard machine
I like to try openSUSE but I can't deal with zypper after using pacman in arch. zypper is slower than even apt so it's not good choice for me
I'm a proud Gecko linux user, tumbleweed based - is the LINUX OS
Been using suse since ages now. Can't even remember. Either 8.1 or 9.1. it always was miles ahead of its competition and it still is. Perhaps having a few gaming yast patterns in it might be just the thing to convince people.
Although, I distro hopped from time to time. Somehow, I always return to openSUSE TW. Mostly, I use tiling window manager Hyprland.
What about community support? Are the mods arrogant? How easy is it to say, install a network wifi printer/scanner? I liked Silverblue, but SB restricts flatpak access to packages like Evolution. These are my concerns. I subscribed!
My OpenSuse is OpenSuse kalpa. Tumbleweed is the rolling release. I daily drive both Nixos rolling and OpenSuse kalpa long before Tyler switched to Nixos and Matt switched to OpenSuse tumbleweed btw.
hi, great video, I wanted to ask you what theme you use on your Linux distribution
This one here is everforest
@@TheLinuxCast hello thx u very much have a good day
Was going to jump into Fedora, but heck, I'll give openSUSE a shot, thanks for convincing me. I'm new to Linux, so hopefully it all works out.
I'm convinced. Been daily driving Debian 12 as my first Linux distro (didn't follow the Linux Mint / [insert other beginner distro here]) and once I got everything configured as I wanted it, yeah I mean it's definitely Debian lol, no issues. But I always felt like I was missing out being the old geezer running Debian. If I want to combine stability with a rolling release, I think the next logical step would be either Fedora or OpenSUSE. I felt like jumping on the Red Hat hate train for no reason so OpenSUSE it is boys, wish me luck tomorrow x)
I been using Slowroll on my desktop and laptop. I know the stability of the OpenQA system but I don't need the most uptodate packages but can't go with Leap because of how outofdate of everything. BTW Slowroll is experimental but it suppose to be between TW and Leap
I'm also using Slowroll. It checks all boxes for me. A moderately up-to-date rolling release without having a ton of daily updates.
How big are the updates?
@alexstone691 You get one big update every month sometime after two months. Other than that, the updates are mostly security updates that are bellow 50Mb at best.
For those new to the channel, Matt becomes an instant Fanboy for anything he likes. He use to be a huge advocate for Arch Linux.
Yeah we are taking bets on how long his enthusiasm for Open SUSE lasts. Because he jumps around so much, usually, his videos cover a lot of topics.
Or he wants a rolling release that has a different release philosophy to that of arch etc. Namely including the latest stable release of a package as opposed to the latest release of a package. There is a difference...
I actually walked away from debian 20-odd years ago because testing was shipping an unstable/experimental version of gcc that had a broken c++ compiler, rather than the (working) version that the gcc project had marked as the latest stable release.
I need more on openSUSE from you. Thankyou
After hopping round a lot over the last few years I'm sticking with Debian testing, it's got newer packages than stable but not so much newer that things break, I love Void also, but it has a tiny amount of packages in it's repositories compared to Debian
Same. I've had the same rolling Debian testing release installed for over 10 years at this point with very few issues. It's even been copied from one drive to another and survived at least one full computer rebuild.
I'd also second that to Void. I usually have a chroot or container of it that I play around with when I have a bit of time.
...for the Fedora Copr and broken packages, on the website/page of the package it shows the date and the state of the build. Have a great day.
I really like the KDE Plasma Gruvbox. Got any dots?
I can listen to your opensuse rants for hours daumn
Hey Matt, I've been lurker for a few months and have been listening to your podcasts regularly on spotify. Really enjoying your content as a new-ish linux user. If you see this, or to anyone else that knows, what KDE theme are you using? I was using Andromeda KDE prior to 6.0, but whatever you are using looks gorgeous. Also, what icons are those? Keep up the great work!
I like what you did there @10:24 "a small nuggetive"
I really liked some features opensuse provides but at the same time some things annoyed the hell out of me
- There is rescue mode in iso file with script that automatically mounts your system so you could repair things
- The installer which most people don't like, while it was a bit confusing it provides the overview before beginning the installation which i love as it shows all the options set
Things i hate
- zypper is meh the plasma widget worked better for me most of time
- tumbleweed updates are HUGE, it took 2 hours to update my laptop with an i3 which is too much IMO
This is exactly what I was looking for
Tumbleweed is also available for installation in WSL and it's great because of fresh packages and only running 5 processes when you open a shell. Requires a bit more research for some stuff than Ubuntu (like how TF do I get bash manual installed) but it's great for development on current versions.
Matt, what is that KDE Plasma theme and icon set you're using? It looks gorgeous!!
It's everforest/evergarden. I don't remember what the icons are, sorry
@@TheLinuxCast Excellent, thank you!! I'll find the icons.
I like the look of OpenSUSE though the X11/KDE version tipped the scales at 1.2Gb RAM on a fresh boot in a VM
Do you have a link to your wallpaper, Matt? Thank you.
Hi Matt, which font do you use in your system?
Been using 15.5 Leap as a daily driver for a while (have used TW previously) and it's great. Normally I run an XFCE version but Plasma has been working just as well honestly. Infact, Plasma gave me issues on Debian often but not on Leap?
Is that a vanilla opensuse or some kind of ricing?
Tumbleweed was my favourite distro until I discovered nixos, though I recently had an issue with tumbleweed on my old laptop, I had xfce installed, but decided to try mate, so I installed the mate pattern and restarted, but it wouldn't login, so I tried gdm, same problem, then I tried sddm, same problem, so I logged into xfce and did a zypper dup, it downloaded 1.8G of packages and when it was almost finished installing them the xserver crashed and booted me out to a tty, I figured the update must have finished so I rebooted, but it rebooted to a tty, I tired to run zypper but zypper wouldn't run because of some missing rpm or something, so my system was broken, if it was installed on btrfs I could have booted into another snapshot, but it wasn't because I've found that btrfs doesn't perform very well on low end laptops, so instead I tried mate on my main system which runs on nixos, I changed one word in the config and did a rebuild, I restarted and logged into mate, and thought to myself, well that was easy.
I'm not a Linux expert by any means but I think Fedora has a great balance between being up to date and being stable too, with rpm being widely supported. I'm not sure what problems you have with it but I've found very few. As a gamer I find it to be a great distro.
package availability is the biggest reason I want to switch from fedora. I can't though because I'm in the middle of a semester and can't risk breakages from changing
I'm probably going to have to move from Arch to OpenSuSE at some point in future. I need the professional toolset for my work to be provided, supported and maintained by a company like Suse. Currently i do get the same tools available on Arch of course, but it's not the same thing compared to when they are provided with additional support and version selections maintained by a company.
snapper is amazing.
I like this kid. Subbed
Is there a option snapper snapshot can be accessed in grub ? Like garuda ?
OpenSUSE is, in my 12 Linux years--Rock Solid.
Can i install and use normally DNF instead of Zypper? Forgive my reason but i have done commits to the DNF repo and it kinda is my baby...Also, would you say Zypper is better?
so with the package availability, you dont feel the need for flatpak/snap/appimage?