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Personally, I’d give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a look. I moved from Leap to Tumbleweed last year and have found it very stable. It seems to have a good inventory of

Personally, I’d give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a look. I moved from Leap to Tumbleweed last year and have found it very stable. It seems to have a good inventory of development tools.

rramadass 2y ago
Seconded. I have been a longtime user of OpenSUSE (and plain SuSE from its early days) and highly recommend it. YaST makes configuring and managing the system from a single place a breeze. All tools/apps are easily available and everything is very stable. My advice is to stick to one distro over a long period of time so one can become familiar and comfortable with it.
- tmtvl 2y ago
  Thirded, OpenSUSE has a pretty good partitioner on its installer which makes it easy to set up encryption and snapshots. It even sets up LUKS1 encryption on an encrypted boot partition. And the Open Build Service, while not as big as the AUR, still holds a ton of applications.
  - rramadass 2y ago
    Some more data from https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/147u5c1/is_it_good_to_use_opensuse_as_a_daily_os/ https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/147u5c1/is_it_goo... As for why I believe OpenSUSE is great for daily driving: Tumbleweed always receives the latest packages from upstream development. This means that the distribution is guaranteed to work on the latest hardware and benefit from patches for optimal performance. As an example, Tumbleweed gained the optional x86-64-v3 packages while Arch, Fedora still lack these optimizations. On top of that, it also outperformed other distributions including Arch in various benchmarks. Btrfs with Snapper can be utilized so the system can be rolled back to a working snapshot in case an update breaks anything. Which leads on the further point... Packages are tested through OpenQA before they are distributed, ensuring that updates are stable, and if they pass the extensive QA, it ships automatically. So in most cases, OpenSUSE often gets the latest versions of software hours to days after upstream publishes those changes. On Arch, it took over a month for the maintainer to update GNOME 44. OBS - The Open Build System which is similar to the AUR allows anyone to create and publish packages not found in the official repositories or packman. IMO this is a better approach to COPR or the AUR as they still go through openQA to detect problems with compilation. OpenSUSE is desktop environment agnostic. GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon etc are all a priority and receive the same level of development. Other distros have been known to have weird quirky behaviors on certain DEs that doesn't seem to be an issue here. Zypper is probably the most cohesive feature packed package manager out there. It can seamlessly change vendors to a different package source to avoid dependency/system breakages, provides solutions on conflicting packages and much more. OpenSUSE combats software problems in smarter ways than other distributions. They have extensive backports for almost everything from the kernel,X11,firmware,KDE etc all of which is provided officially and not from third party developers like Ubuntu PPAs. This way, the software installed from SUSE directly can be trusted. YaST is an amazing system configuration tool that allows you to administer the installation with a breeze. IMO this is one of the greatest selling points to this distro, and it never disappoints. Security - OpenSUSE is more hardened by default than Arch/Fedora/Ubuntu, meaning it can be trusted and dependent on. If you value security highly, it remains of the best options for security conscious individuals. All in all, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/MicroOS are the best distributions available in my biased opinion. Combine this with the long track record of SUSE making solid distros, it simply cannot be beaten for desktop use.

Personally, I’d give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a look. I moved from Leap to Tumbleweed last year and have found it very stable. It seems to have a good inventory of development tools.

rramadass 2y ago

Seconded. I have been a longtime user of OpenSUSE (and plain SuSE from its early days) and highly recommend it. YaST makes configuring and managing the system from a single place a breeze. All tools/apps are easily available and everything is very stable. My advice is to stick to one distro over a long period of time so one can become familiar and comfortable with it.

tmtvl 2y ago
Thirded, OpenSUSE has a pretty good partitioner on its installer which makes it easy to set up encryption and snapshots. It even sets up LUKS1 encryption on an encrypted boot partition. And the Open Build Service, while not as big as the AUR, still holds a ton of applications.
- rramadass 2y ago
  Some more data from https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/147u5c1/is_it_good_to_use_opensuse_as_a_daily_os/ https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/147u5c1/is_it_goo... As for why I believe OpenSUSE is great for daily driving: Tumbleweed always receives the latest packages from upstream development. This means that the distribution is guaranteed to work on the latest hardware and benefit from patches for optimal performance. As an example, Tumbleweed gained the optional x86-64-v3 packages while Arch, Fedora still lack these optimizations. On top of that, it also outperformed other distributions including Arch in various benchmarks. Btrfs with Snapper can be utilized so the system can be rolled back to a working snapshot in case an update breaks anything. Which leads on the further point... Packages are tested through OpenQA before they are distributed, ensuring that updates are stable, and if they pass the extensive QA, it ships automatically. So in most cases, OpenSUSE often gets the latest versions of software hours to days after upstream publishes those changes. On Arch, it took over a month for the maintainer to update GNOME 44. OBS - The Open Build System which is similar to the AUR allows anyone to create and publish packages not found in the official repositories or packman. IMO this is a better approach to COPR or the AUR as they still go through openQA to detect problems with compilation. OpenSUSE is desktop environment agnostic. GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon etc are all a priority and receive the same level of development. Other distros have been known to have weird quirky behaviors on certain DEs that doesn't seem to be an issue here. Zypper is probably the most cohesive feature packed package manager out there. It can seamlessly change vendors to a different package source to avoid dependency/system breakages, provides solutions on conflicting packages and much more. OpenSUSE combats software problems in smarter ways than other distributions. They have extensive backports for almost everything from the kernel,X11,firmware,KDE etc all of which is provided officially and not from third party developers like Ubuntu PPAs. This way, the software installed from SUSE directly can be trusted. YaST is an amazing system configuration tool that allows you to administer the installation with a breeze. IMO this is one of the greatest selling points to this distro, and it never disappoints. Security - OpenSUSE is more hardened by default than Arch/Fedora/Ubuntu, meaning it can be trusted and dependent on. If you value security highly, it remains of the best options for security conscious individuals. All in all, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/MicroOS are the best distributions available in my biased opinion. Combine this with the long track record of SUSE making solid distros, it simply cannot be beaten for desktop use.