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SUSE has always been this perennial figure in the Linux world for me; the Linux Distro that isn't talked about often, but is generally liked and respected, by m

SUSE has always been this perennial figure in the Linux world for me; the Linux Distro that isn't talked about often, but is generally liked and respected, by most people who use it. I ran OpenSUSE for about a year in 2013-2014, and it did sort of have the Just Works nature to it: things did more or less what I expected them to do without much tinkering. It was the first Linux that I liked enough to be my sole operating system instead of dual booting, which should say something by itself. I stopped running OpenSUSE because I bought a new laptop which had Nvidia Optimus, and someone told me that that was easier to get working with Arch, so that's what I did, and I haven't really touched SUSE since, but I will always respect it for getting me interested in Linux and open source.

unyttigfjelltol 2y ago
I picked OpenSUSE as my personal desktop 15 years ago because its YaST confuguration module helped with administration. Same positve experience, apart from the occasional hiccup updating NVIDIA proprietary drivers.
- tombert 2y ago
  Yeah, the reason I used OpenSUSE is that someone told me that YaST was more or less analogous to the Windows Control Panel, and that SUSE was relatively friendly for people who had mostly used Windows. I think that description is fairly accurate, I didn't really much trouble navigating around SUSE. I'm an annoying math person now so I use NixOS for everything, and I don't really plan on leaving any time soon, but if I did SUSE would honestly still be a contender.
einpoklum 2y ago
I use it at (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, at work); I never particularly liked or disliked it; but once they adopted systemd - I lost respect for it.
- MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
  Sorry for your loss. I personally find that systemd solves real problems and makes Linux better. It has worts, but so does everything.
  - einpoklum 2y ago
    Switching to Windows could also "solve lots of problems". It introduces many problems though and is an undesirable thing to do, especially in terms of the ecosystem of free software. About "making Linux better" - that's false on principle, on architectural grounds, and is not a matter of finding.
    - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
      I personally found no issues with systemd in principal, the architectural issues are largely transient and are mostly fixed, and I can name multiple examples where it has in fact made things better: - Timer units prevent long job duplication and have mechanisms for restarting as soon as possible if an execution is missed. Cron can't do that on its own, and scripting such functionality is brittle. - Service units are much simpler and easier to understand than shell script init, restart handing is very good to have built in, and dependency management is extraordinarily useful. User units are also great. - Automatic capturing of logs with journald and its built-in disk usage limitations are better in practice than piping to files/syslog and running logrotate on blind schedules. - cgroup resource controls for processes are far more effective than nice/ionice, etc, and can be altered on the fly for every unit without restarting. - systemd-resolved is one of the few ways to get system-wide support for dns-over-tls, dnssec, and per-service/network choice of DNS servers without considerable effort. These are just the features that I personally see and interact with almost daily, but I have seen and used enough to know that its dbus and udev integrations are stellar and enable useful functionality for desktops and networking. I understand that some people have decided that religious adherence to a vague unix dogma is more important than features, usability, and reliability, but please accept that some of us have work to do, which includes the maintainers of major Linux distributions.
- toprerules 2y ago
  100% of people who dislike systemd can't come up with a better solution that solves all of the problems that systemd was created to solve.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > 100% of people who dislike systemd can't come up with a better solution that solves all of the problems that systemd was created to solve. Perhaps because these people consider that solving all the problems that systemd claims to solve does introduce too many other problems, so they tend to consider it to be the better solution to solve, say, 90 % of the problems that systemd solves, but introduce less new problems.
    - toprerules 2y ago
      That's every piece of technology. If this wasn't the case, we wouldn't have jobs. Resistance to change on the basis of "it will cause more problems" halts all technological progress. If you think you can do better, show. me. the. code.
  - plagiarist 2y ago
    All the problems that systemd is "solving" is a large part of what we dislike, I think. So, no, of course we wouldn't have a replacement software. My recent experience was trying out Fedora atomic. I love that idea. I found systemd is kinda nice for service management. But still, I kept running into issues with it spreading into everywhere, doing its own thing, and difficulty working around it. Partially figuring out the atomicity, and partially that no other distro I've tried has leaned in that hard to systemd. I'm moving on to Arch since it looks like I can at least get this out of my boot process. (Or, more on the topic of the thread, Tumbleweed looks like an interesting take on being able to roll back to known working states as a replacement for Fedora atomic.)
    - tombert 2y ago
      I think Gentoo explicitly does not do systemd, might be worth it to look at that if you want to avoid systemd, considering that I think the "official" stance of Arch is systemd. There's also SixOS coming soon (https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/hub/de/event/sixos-a-nix-os-without-systemd/ https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/hub/de/event/sixos-a-nix...). NixOS does kind of a similar atomic thing, so you might enjoy that, but vanilla NixOS is systemd based, so once SixOS drops you might get exactly what you want.
- tombert 2y ago
  Everyone craps on systemd, but I have never really had an issue with it. It does the job I want it to, I think a lot of the complaints are overblown. Either way, doesn't every major Linux distro other than Gentoo use systemd now?
  - einpoklum 2y ago
    Actually, no, not all major distributions have caved and adopted systemd: Other than Gentoo, there is also SlackWare. (There is also Devuan, which is "Debian without systemd", i.e. minimal changes to allow for systemd not to be used, but of course that doesn't change the default for everything depending directly on Debian.) There are all sorts of complaints against systemd, some may or may not be overblown - I certainly have not investigated many use cases - but the problem is with the core of it: A single software project gradually taking over more and more of the OS userland. That is simply not a good thing to stick on your system. No less importantly, I don't believe systemd solves any significant problems vis-a-vis its alternatives.

unyttigfjelltol 2y ago

I picked OpenSUSE as my personal desktop 15 years ago because its YaST confuguration module helped with administration. Same positve experience, apart from the occasional hiccup updating NVIDIA proprietary drivers.

tombert 2y ago
Yeah, the reason I used OpenSUSE is that someone told me that YaST was more or less analogous to the Windows Control Panel, and that SUSE was relatively friendly for people who had mostly used Windows. I think that description is fairly accurate, I didn't really much trouble navigating around SUSE. I'm an annoying math person now so I use NixOS for everything, and I don't really plan on leaving any time soon, but if I did SUSE would honestly still be a contender.

einpoklum 2y ago

I use it at (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, at work); I never particularly liked or disliked it; but once they adopted systemd - I lost respect for it.

MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
Sorry for your loss. I personally find that systemd solves real problems and makes Linux better. It has worts, but so does everything.
- einpoklum 2y ago
  Switching to Windows could also "solve lots of problems". It introduces many problems though and is an undesirable thing to do, especially in terms of the ecosystem of free software. About "making Linux better" - that's false on principle, on architectural grounds, and is not a matter of finding.
  - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
    I personally found no issues with systemd in principal, the architectural issues are largely transient and are mostly fixed, and I can name multiple examples where it has in fact made things better: - Timer units prevent long job duplication and have mechanisms for restarting as soon as possible if an execution is missed. Cron can't do that on its own, and scripting such functionality is brittle. - Service units are much simpler and easier to understand than shell script init, restart handing is very good to have built in, and dependency management is extraordinarily useful. User units are also great. - Automatic capturing of logs with journald and its built-in disk usage limitations are better in practice than piping to files/syslog and running logrotate on blind schedules. - cgroup resource controls for processes are far more effective than nice/ionice, etc, and can be altered on the fly for every unit without restarting. - systemd-resolved is one of the few ways to get system-wide support for dns-over-tls, dnssec, and per-service/network choice of DNS servers without considerable effort. These are just the features that I personally see and interact with almost daily, but I have seen and used enough to know that its dbus and udev integrations are stellar and enable useful functionality for desktops and networking. I understand that some people have decided that religious adherence to a vague unix dogma is more important than features, usability, and reliability, but please accept that some of us have work to do, which includes the maintainers of major Linux distributions.
toprerules 2y ago
100% of people who dislike systemd can't come up with a better solution that solves all of the problems that systemd was created to solve.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > 100% of people who dislike systemd can't come up with a better solution that solves all of the problems that systemd was created to solve. Perhaps because these people consider that solving all the problems that systemd claims to solve does introduce too many other problems, so they tend to consider it to be the better solution to solve, say, 90 % of the problems that systemd solves, but introduce less new problems.
  - toprerules 2y ago
    That's every piece of technology. If this wasn't the case, we wouldn't have jobs. Resistance to change on the basis of "it will cause more problems" halts all technological progress. If you think you can do better, show. me. the. code.
- plagiarist 2y ago
  All the problems that systemd is "solving" is a large part of what we dislike, I think. So, no, of course we wouldn't have a replacement software. My recent experience was trying out Fedora atomic. I love that idea. I found systemd is kinda nice for service management. But still, I kept running into issues with it spreading into everywhere, doing its own thing, and difficulty working around it. Partially figuring out the atomicity, and partially that no other distro I've tried has leaned in that hard to systemd. I'm moving on to Arch since it looks like I can at least get this out of my boot process. (Or, more on the topic of the thread, Tumbleweed looks like an interesting take on being able to roll back to known working states as a replacement for Fedora atomic.)
  - tombert 2y ago
    I think Gentoo explicitly does not do systemd, might be worth it to look at that if you want to avoid systemd, considering that I think the "official" stance of Arch is systemd. There's also SixOS coming soon (https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/hub/de/event/sixos-a-nix-os-without-systemd/ https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/hub/de/event/sixos-a-nix...). NixOS does kind of a similar atomic thing, so you might enjoy that, but vanilla NixOS is systemd based, so once SixOS drops you might get exactly what you want.
tombert 2y ago
Everyone craps on systemd, but I have never really had an issue with it. It does the job I want it to, I think a lot of the complaints are overblown. Either way, doesn't every major Linux distro other than Gentoo use systemd now?
- einpoklum 2y ago
  Actually, no, not all major distributions have caved and adopted systemd: Other than Gentoo, there is also SlackWare. (There is also Devuan, which is "Debian without systemd", i.e. minimal changes to allow for systemd not to be used, but of course that doesn't change the default for everything depending directly on Debian.) There are all sorts of complaints against systemd, some may or may not be overblown - I certainly have not investigated many use cases - but the problem is with the core of it: A single software project gradually taking over more and more of the OS userland. That is simply not a good thing to stick on your system. No less importantly, I don't believe systemd solves any significant problems vis-a-vis its alternatives.