4 ms·

I used SLES for years at a bank (ran thousands of them) and it was as good (if not better) than any other distro. I always preferred it to RedHat. When they Sus

I used SLES for years at a bank (ran thousands of them) and it was as good (if not better) than any other distro. I always preferred it to RedHat. When they Suse released SLED 10 in 2007, it really was talked about. The easy YaST admin gui, the spinning cube desktop effects, improved Windows interoperability, autoyast for fully automatic installation from PXE boot... I haven't used it since. I googled for "sled Linux review" to see what I've been missing. The top hit on Google is from 2006. "Tumbleweed" indeed. Any of you boffins use opensuse?

pestaa 5y ago
OpenSUSE on the desktop. GeckoLinux, in fact, which is a batteries included distribution of it. Loving it. For me, Tumbleweed is where the Linux FOSS magic is nowadays.
mhitza 5y ago
Tried out Leap and Tumbleweed once each. Leap (I guess) 6 years back, to get a glimpse at how btrfs snapshots/restore worked in practice (I think the tool it builds upon is snapper). At the time I was using LVM snapshots on Fedora and found the btrfs snapshots way slower than what I was doing with LVM. Then I tried Tumbleweed a couple of years back, with the intent of switching to another rpm based distro that is more upstream. Installation was slow and the package downloads didn't have retry logic built in so I had to go through the process of couple of times. Had a few things to tweak since SUSE doesn't use NetworkManager but networkd (or something like that), which was giving me some trouble I can't recall. YaST might be cool for power users, but as I'm always using Ansible for system configuration I skip past it and modify files directly anyway. Worked fine, but in the end didn't find enough upsides to switch to it from Fedora. I might give it another try a few years down the line.
mongol 5y ago
I am using it, have used Suse distros for about 20 years now. I like it better than anything else have tried. Debian moves too slow and Ubuntu too contrarian for me. About Fedora I don't know so much but maybe too experimental. The newer ones I have not tried, like Arch.
jraph 5y ago
I come from Ubuntu and then Debian. Debian is the distro I know best (because Ubuntu from years ago is much more similar than today's Debian than today's Ubuntu). It's also the distro I use on servers. However, I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed (KDE edition) for 5 years on laptops now and I think this is the one that gives the most polished experience. That's because of several things such as: - KDE is up to date. And each new version is strictly better and more polished than the previous one, and that has been true for years - One-click install actually works, even for software in repositories you haven't configured yet, and foreign repositories are way easier to use than PPAs. - YaST is good for the occasional thing I can't bother to learn to do from the command line - Zypper is very good too. And allow you to interactively chose solutions when something goes wrong instead of failing fast like apt. - it is a rolling release with both the polish and the software catalogue of a regular distribution. There's no unsupported AUR repository to add and manage for widespread software, it's usually already in the core repositories. - new software version on Linux desktop matters. For instance, today I (finally!!) have flawless pinch zoom both with the touchpad and the touchscreen, both on X and Wayland. Many distributions don't seem to have it yet. I keep a Debian systemd container for the occasional thing that's easier to install on Debian, or to work around the occasional glitch (for instance Meld is currently broken for me on openSUSE Tumbleweed but it works fine on Debian Bullseye). What drew me to openSUSE is the difficulty to have up to date KDE software on Debian. Had Debian have a current KDE repository, I would probably have never discovered openSUSE. On Ubuntu you can use Neon, but Ubuntu is annoying because of Snap and stuff (if you are going out of your way to package something, just use goddam Debian packages, not some half-arsed container technologies depending on a service that runs proprietary software and that does not distinguish between free and non free software). Also openSUSE's integration is really good and seems more stable than KDE Neon. So, Debian on servers and openSUSE on desktops for me.
- scns 5y ago
  Have to agree with pretty much everything you wrote. > There's no unsupported AUR repository to add and manage for widespread software, it's usually already in the core repositories. There is some software that is missing, but you can get it with OPI from OBS, often times pulling from repositories by SUSE. https://github.com/openSUSE/opi https://github.com/openSUSE/opi

pestaa 5y ago

OpenSUSE on the desktop. GeckoLinux, in fact, which is a batteries included distribution of it. Loving it. For me, Tumbleweed is where the Linux FOSS magic is nowadays.

mhitza 5y ago

Tried out Leap and Tumbleweed once each. Leap (I guess) 6 years back, to get a glimpse at how btrfs snapshots/restore worked in practice (I think the tool it builds upon is snapper). At the time I was using LVM snapshots on Fedora and found the btrfs snapshots way slower than what I was doing with LVM. Then I tried Tumbleweed a couple of years back, with the intent of switching to another rpm based distro that is more upstream. Installation was slow and the package downloads didn't have retry logic built in so I had to go through the process of couple of times. Had a few things to tweak since SUSE doesn't use NetworkManager but networkd (or something like that), which was giving me some trouble I can't recall. YaST might be cool for power users, but as I'm always using Ansible for system configuration I skip past it and modify files directly anyway. Worked fine, but in the end didn't find enough upsides to switch to it from Fedora. I might give it another try a few years down the line.

mongol 5y ago

I am using it, have used Suse distros for about 20 years now. I like it better than anything else have tried. Debian moves too slow and Ubuntu too contrarian for me. About Fedora I don't know so much but maybe too experimental. The newer ones I have not tried, like Arch.

jraph 5y ago

I come from Ubuntu and then Debian. Debian is the distro I know best (because Ubuntu from years ago is much more similar than today's Debian than today's Ubuntu). It's also the distro I use on servers. However, I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed (KDE edition) for 5 years on laptops now and I think this is the one that gives the most polished experience. That's because of several things such as: - KDE is up to date. And each new version is strictly better and more polished than the previous one, and that has been true for years - One-click install actually works, even for software in repositories you haven't configured yet, and foreign repositories are way easier to use than PPAs. - YaST is good for the occasional thing I can't bother to learn to do from the command line - Zypper is very good too. And allow you to interactively chose solutions when something goes wrong instead of failing fast like apt. - it is a rolling release with both the polish and the software catalogue of a regular distribution. There's no unsupported AUR repository to add and manage for widespread software, it's usually already in the core repositories. - new software version on Linux desktop matters. For instance, today I (finally!!) have flawless pinch zoom both with the touchpad and the touchscreen, both on X and Wayland. Many distributions don't seem to have it yet. I keep a Debian systemd container for the occasional thing that's easier to install on Debian, or to work around the occasional glitch (for instance Meld is currently broken for me on openSUSE Tumbleweed but it works fine on Debian Bullseye). What drew me to openSUSE is the difficulty to have up to date KDE software on Debian. Had Debian have a current KDE repository, I would probably have never discovered openSUSE. On Ubuntu you can use Neon, but Ubuntu is annoying because of Snap and stuff (if you are going out of your way to package something, just use goddam Debian packages, not some half-arsed container technologies depending on a service that runs proprietary software and that does not distinguish between free and non free software). Also openSUSE's integration is really good and seems more stable than KDE Neon. So, Debian on servers and openSUSE on desktops for me.

scns 5y ago
Have to agree with pretty much everything you wrote. > There's no unsupported AUR repository to add and manage for widespread software, it's usually already in the core repositories. There is some software that is missing, but you can get it with OPI from OBS, often times pulling from repositories by SUSE. https://github.com/openSUSE/opi https://github.com/openSUSE/opi