OpenSUSE is an INCREDIBLE Linux Distribution for daily use
Hey fellas,
+15 years Solutions Architect here, not boasting just basing my thoughts. And no, not LLM written. By the way, I am opinionated, I take it :) I'm the kind of Linux user who wants to get things done, do the work, not fight the tools.
I've been using OpenSUSE as a daily driver for a while, to the point I even forgot I was using it. I'm dual-booting it because I still play some anti-cheat games and rely on audio drivers for low-latency interfaces. Productive work stays here though. Anyway, wanted to share my love for it:
- Up to date? For Desktop users, state of the art software and runtime libraries is key. Bugs get fixed all the time, new features and performance improvements are added, and security patches addressed. I get it, point-based distributions still update on security patches, but daily drivers rely on up to date things, obviously I'm mainly speaking of the Desktop Environment stack. Unless you are using the system for critical runtime, users shouldn't need to be on an outdated desktop environment for months out of fear of breaking it.
- Stability? You have it, OpenSUSE has an incredible delivery quality for a rolling-release distribution. I've rarely, if ever, seen it break on an update.
- Upgrade concerns? Non-existent, true rolling distribution means you do things progressively, not in big cumulative jumps that require snapshot quality proof. To my philosophy, it fits.
- Pragmatism? You've got it. OpenSUSE achieves perfectly safe commercially licensed distribution methods. Zypper gets the job done, and repositories are a cake to deal with. You can ignore YaST, or you can appreciate it for not having to remember or google search a bunch of command line commends tot get things done.
- Long-term concerns? Yes, fancy and hype distros are maintained by singular "hero" or a group of garage enthusiasts. No offence (and all due respect), but when one of those people needs to take care of life, rotation hits them hard. Organizations on the other hand have more sustainable lifecycles, even when the project is community maintained, it matters to know who is behind.
- Support and Compatibility? This is .rpm based, obviously second to .deb packages, is still among the two formats supported by licensed software and vendors. Flatpak takes care of the rest. The trickiest part is perhaps to survive when you find guides for Ubuntu where the library you need to install has a completely different name in Suse (the whole -devel vs lib- conventions)
What can I say, for me, it ticks all my boxes. It's by far the most flawless experience I've ever had. I am not sure I'd recommend it out of the box to newcomers (don't hurt me, I do recommend Ubuntu, and not the hype-distros that get things complicated), as I'm deep into Linux.
I wouldn't say it is a Distribution that talks absolute newcomers' language, it talks systemd and btrfs and zypper, but if you know what you're doing, the heck, this is unbeatable.
Anyways, huge kudos to the maintainers of this distribution, to the community that supports it and its users, and to all Open Software supporters. I'm all down for a more transparent and open system adoption, without falling into extremes :)
Thanks for being home when I have to get things done!