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This does all sound quite compelling. Somehow OpenSUSE has fallen under my radar, I've been an Arch user for a few years, and Gentoo user before that, and I'd o

by wjoe 11y ago

This does all sound quite compelling. Somehow OpenSUSE has fallen under my radar, I've been an Arch user for a few years, and Gentoo user before that, and I'd only ever be interested in rolling distros, but I wasn't aware that OpenSUSE had Tumbleweed for this. I did find dependency conflicts all too common on Gentoo, and keeping the system up to date was a frequent struggle. I've not had any major issues with Arch recently, and any that occur are usually fixed by doing a full system upgrade, but they do occur from time to time. I'd be interested to see how SUSE differs. One thing I've noticed when doing a quick bit of reading on your Wiki - it sounds like you can't update Nvidia drivers from the package manager in Tumbleweed, and it has to be done manually. It also sounds like this process has to be done any time you update the kernel or X. This sounds like quite a pain - manually installing the nvidia drivers isn't exactly complex, but it's a number of manual steps that I'd rather not have to go through outside of the package manager every time I do a system update. Am I missing something here, or is this the case? It also sounds like it supports installing with sysvinit rather than systemd, which is a rarity these days, and might appeal to some people.

giancarlostoro 11y ago
For years I only used distributions based on Debian, Slackware was my first distro but it's such a burden to get Wi-Fi going. I gave SUSE a shot and have not looked back, anything I need to install is available. I think my only issue with openSUSE was getting DMD (D language compiler) to cooperate for some reason. I'll likely just use Vagrant with Ubuntu as a work around. My only issue is the fact I can't have it on DigitalOcean as a one click install. :)
- rbrownsuse 11y ago
  People have been asking for that for quite a while.. https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/3812214-include-opensuse-as-a-droplet-image-option https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce... There are plenty of hosting providers who do offer Leap and sometimes even Tumbleweed images. My blog is hosted on Hetzner (they're local ;)) We have a solid presence on all the major Public Clouds https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Cloud https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Cloud Would love to be everywhere, so if any hosting companies want to get in touch about using openSUSE on their platform, my contact details are on the bottom of that article
  - giancarlostoro 11y ago
    Thank you for the UserVoice link, I added in my vote, hopefully others here in HN who enjoy SUSE do as well. I would also love to see SUSE more in the cloud, it is definitely a great distro.
  - majewsky 11y ago
    Hetzner is really awesome. They even offer a painless Arch Linux installation which works great.
mdip 11y ago
I agree with you on Gentoo. I loved the project from the rolling distribution standpoint and had run it for a while but long-term maintenance of it was a mess. I'd reserve a few hours for doing updates since every emerge would have me validating via diffs every configuration file (which it, unintelligently, wanted to return to the "sample" state). Tumbleweed struck the right balance for me. Bleeding edge, rolling distribution with a mix of easy maintenance and configuration (and at the time all of Gentoo's emerge operations involved compiling from source, so you could add "faster maintenance" to the list). I have a side-project I'm going to start this weekend that'll have me checking out Gentoo again, is it still this ugly or has that part improved?
- LoneWolf 11y ago
  Being a Gentoo user for years, if your issue is the config file updates I would say they are nearly if not the same, AFAIK there are some better tools other than etc-update that may make it easier. The whole compiling from source well you can avoid some that with binary packages but that is not the focus of the distro, it has always been compiling from source. About the updates I currently run it on a server and plan on moving my laptop from windows to Gentoo, at least on the server there are no issues, I have a cron to run sync everyday and send me an email report, when where are too much new packages I update it, usually pretty quick, unless there are new versions for gcc or other large packages (gcc takes 15min). I would say give it a try again.
  - mdip 11y ago
    Many thanks for the info -- actually, the reason I'm looking into Gentoo, again, is specifically because of the "compile from source". I have a particular need where this is the only solution that suits it well so I'm glad they haven't abandoned that (I seem to recall that about the time I left Gentoo, they had just introduced binary sources for the kernel and such to speed up getting a system working "from nothing"). I'll poke around for information on alternatives to etc-update. That really was a bear and where I'm planning on using this I'll want to have that work with a lot less overhead.
rbrownsuse 11y ago
nvidia drivers - we don't recommend them because we have a habit of adding kernels quicker than NVIDIA can keep up with their proprietary drivers If you really want to use them, I'd recommend the dkms drivers we have in OBS https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_the_hard_way#Further_readings https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_the_hard_way#Further_read... And yes, I believe if you want you can install with sysvinit, though we are primarily a systemd distribution first (with extensive sysvinit compatibility.. people still love those runlevels)
- wjoe 11y ago
  Ah, that's fine in theory then - I use a dkms package on Arch too since I use a non standard kernel with VFIO patches for PCI passthrough. Interestingly I see people have reported getting PCI passthrough working with the standard SUSE kernel too, so I'll have to give that a try. As far as I can see the x11-video-nvidia package in the page you linked has quite an old nvidia driver version for Tumbleweed - https://software.opensuse.org/package/x11-video-nvidia https://software.opensuse.org/package/x11-video-nvidia Again I might be missing something, and in practice it might be easy to install the latest drivers, but this is a bit off putting. I don't know the details of how your build system works or why it keeping up with Nvidia drivers complicated, but this seems like it'd be quite a fundamental thing for a lot of users. The vast majority of people who play games on Linux are going to want recent proprietary Nvidia drivers, so having that as a footnote at the bottom of an article that says it's not recommended/supported doesn't inspire confidence. Still, I'm intrigued enough to give it a try.
  - rbrownsuse 11y ago
    The search seems to be doing something weird at the moment.. There is a second "openSUSE Tumbleweed" under the "unsupported distributions" category, and that has the more up to date nvidia packages I'd expect If someone would like to take a look at the lovely ruby behind software.opensuse.org and fix that bug, I'm sure we'd love the pull requests :) https://github.com/openSUSE/software-o-o https://github.com/openSUSE/software-o-o
- digi_owl 11y ago

by wjoe 11y ago

giancarlostoro 11y ago

For years I only used distributions based on Debian, Slackware was my first distro but it's such a burden to get Wi-Fi going. I gave SUSE a shot and have not looked back, anything I need to install is available. I think my only issue with openSUSE was getting DMD (D language compiler) to cooperate for some reason. I'll likely just use Vagrant with Ubuntu as a work around. My only issue is the fact I can't have it on DigitalOcean as a one click install. :)

rbrownsuse 11y ago
People have been asking for that for quite a while.. https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/3812214-include-opensuse-as-a-droplet-image-option https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce... There are plenty of hosting providers who do offer Leap and sometimes even Tumbleweed images. My blog is hosted on Hetzner (they're local ;)) We have a solid presence on all the major Public Clouds https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Cloud https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Cloud Would love to be everywhere, so if any hosting companies want to get in touch about using openSUSE on their platform, my contact details are on the bottom of that article
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  Thank you for the UserVoice link, I added in my vote, hopefully others here in HN who enjoy SUSE do as well. I would also love to see SUSE more in the cloud, it is definitely a great distro.
- majewsky 11y ago
  Hetzner is really awesome. They even offer a painless Arch Linux installation which works great.

mdip 11y ago

I agree with you on Gentoo. I loved the project from the rolling distribution standpoint and had run it for a while but long-term maintenance of it was a mess. I'd reserve a few hours for doing updates since every emerge would have me validating via diffs every configuration file (which it, unintelligently, wanted to return to the "sample" state). Tumbleweed struck the right balance for me. Bleeding edge, rolling distribution with a mix of easy maintenance and configuration (and at the time all of Gentoo's emerge operations involved compiling from source, so you could add "faster maintenance" to the list). I have a side-project I'm going to start this weekend that'll have me checking out Gentoo again, is it still this ugly or has that part improved?

LoneWolf 11y ago
Being a Gentoo user for years, if your issue is the config file updates I would say they are nearly if not the same, AFAIK there are some better tools other than etc-update that may make it easier. The whole compiling from source well you can avoid some that with binary packages but that is not the focus of the distro, it has always been compiling from source. About the updates I currently run it on a server and plan on moving my laptop from windows to Gentoo, at least on the server there are no issues, I have a cron to run sync everyday and send me an email report, when where are too much new packages I update it, usually pretty quick, unless there are new versions for gcc or other large packages (gcc takes 15min). I would say give it a try again.
- mdip 11y ago
  Many thanks for the info -- actually, the reason I'm looking into Gentoo, again, is specifically because of the "compile from source". I have a particular need where this is the only solution that suits it well so I'm glad they haven't abandoned that (I seem to recall that about the time I left Gentoo, they had just introduced binary sources for the kernel and such to speed up getting a system working "from nothing"). I'll poke around for information on alternatives to etc-update. That really was a bear and where I'm planning on using this I'll want to have that work with a lot less overhead.

rbrownsuse 11y ago

nvidia drivers - we don't recommend them because we have a habit of adding kernels quicker than NVIDIA can keep up with their proprietary drivers If you really want to use them, I'd recommend the dkms drivers we have in OBS https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_the_hard_way#Further_readings https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_the_hard_way#Further_read... And yes, I believe if you want you can install with sysvinit, though we are primarily a systemd distribution first (with extensive sysvinit compatibility.. people still love those runlevels)

wjoe 11y ago
Ah, that's fine in theory then - I use a dkms package on Arch too since I use a non standard kernel with VFIO patches for PCI passthrough. Interestingly I see people have reported getting PCI passthrough working with the standard SUSE kernel too, so I'll have to give that a try. As far as I can see the x11-video-nvidia package in the page you linked has quite an old nvidia driver version for Tumbleweed - https://software.opensuse.org/package/x11-video-nvidia https://software.opensuse.org/package/x11-video-nvidia Again I might be missing something, and in practice it might be easy to install the latest drivers, but this is a bit off putting. I don't know the details of how your build system works or why it keeping up with Nvidia drivers complicated, but this seems like it'd be quite a fundamental thing for a lot of users. The vast majority of people who play games on Linux are going to want recent proprietary Nvidia drivers, so having that as a footnote at the bottom of an article that says it's not recommended/supported doesn't inspire confidence. Still, I'm intrigued enough to give it a try.
- rbrownsuse 11y ago
  The search seems to be doing something weird at the moment.. There is a second "openSUSE Tumbleweed" under the "unsupported distributions" category, and that has the more up to date nvidia packages I'd expect If someone would like to take a look at the lovely ruby behind software.opensuse.org and fix that bug, I'm sure we'd love the pull requests :) https://github.com/openSUSE/software-o-o https://github.com/openSUSE/software-o-o
digi_owl 11y ago