My Experience Using OpenSUSE
After spending one week using openSUSE Tumbleweed, I am writing a review of my experience with it. What issues I faced, how well it served me compared to other distributions, and whether I would recommend this to new users, daily drivers, gamers, or programmers. The post will be updated as I find useful things or run into bugs/crashes.
I use my system primarily for coding, daily browsing, basic image editing, and document preparation. I do not play games at all.
| Sl. No. | Specs | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardware Details | |||
| 1 | Variant | Tumbleweed | Rolling release with OpenQA checking |
| 2 | Processor | 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1334U (12) @ 4.60 GHz | |
| 3 | RAM | 16 GB | |
| 4 | Storage | 512 GB SSD | |
| 5 | File System | Btrfs without Snapshots |
OpenSUSE tumbleweed is a rolling release distribution but still I opted out of Snapshots as this is too storage consuming and complex for me. I believe the OpenQA testing is more than enough to prove its stability. The general advice from community is not to rely on old snapshots since updates ship so frequently. BTW, I have a Live USB as a backup if something goes wrong like a kernel boot failure or system corruption. |
| Operating System Core Details | |||
| 1 | Desktop Environment | KDE Plasma | OpenSUSE has a well maintained release of KDE with latest features and much more stable experience than competing distributions. |
| 2 | Release Model | Rolling | |
| 3 | Update Command | zypper dup | This is the main difference from Leap's sudo zypper update. |
| 4 | YaST | Removed | By default YaST was included but since it is discontinued and replaced, I completely removed it and locked from auto-reinstallation during distribution updates. |
| Personal Tweaks | |||
| 1 | Flatpak Packages | Removed | Out of the box flatpak is included with OpenSUSE tumbleweed installation. But I'm not a fan of flatpak, so I intentionally uninstalled it and limited myself to rpm packages, packman and official repository. |
| 2 | Third-Party Repositories | Packman | Installed for certain proprietary codecs and drivers like intel-media-driver. |
The installation Process
I used a 4GB USB Drive to install OpenSUSE. As the Live ISO needs more space than what I have, I chose Netinstall. With Rufus I made the USB an installation medium and started the installation process.
The installation screen was much different from the installation screen of OpenSUSE Leap. For a beginner, it must be a headache to choose right options and customize the installation how they want, but as I already have experience installing ISO, I managed to choose everything as I wanted. As given in the table above, I chose those options and the installation process has been started
The Netinstall method was much slower than I expected, as must be a mirror or server side issue as I have a fast internet already. I also saw many in online communities complaining about the installation process. Downloading resources over internet connection is very slower. No matter how fast the connection is or using a VPN. After around 1:30 hrs the installation process completed.
First Boot
After the installation process completed, system rebooted directly into TTY mode. Maybe a small bug. But a system reset fixed it and allowed me to boot normally.
First Look
After logging in the experience was much smoother and clean. Just like Leap no unnecessary things. Just a clean KDE Plasma installation. But I noticed something different compared to Leap installation here.
- Flatpak installed by default.
- Have YaST even though it is officially discontinued.
- In tumbleweed, to update the system sudo zypper dup is used instead of sudo zypper update.
- The entire distribution updated as a group which means, after an update some apps can be removed, added or just re-installed.
- Not only the installation process but also zypper is slower.
- Many KDE apps have been pre-installed.
Debloating Process
Even though the first look is so clean, there are still many things I don't want. So, I started to clean up those. But I don't know the commands like used in zypper like apt or dnf as I just tested Leap in the past. So learned those commands used to install, update, clean, or purge data. It was not that hard to learn as just some keywords differed compared to apt, dnf, pacman.
Then I removed,
- Entire Flatpak and limited myself to rpm packages and official repository.
- Removed the pre-installed KDE applications.
- Removed YaST and locked it from auto re-install.
Third-Party Repositories
Then I installed a third-party repository called Packman for proprietary codecs and media drivers. Just like we install Backports on Debian and RPM Fusion on Fedora.
Zypper
Zypper is the default package manager of OpenSUSE distribution. It is advanced and has many more features to compete and stay up-to-date against other package managers like apt, dnf and pacman. But zypper is much slower than other package managers I used. Zypper performs badly on both the downloading process and other tasks like removing software, running python script, etc.
I wonder why such a widely used Linux distribution has done nothing about the slowness of their own package manager for years.
The Removal of YaST
The replacement of YaST with tools like agama (web-installer), cockpit (web-based system management tool) and myrlyn (package management) was the worst move in my opinion. New replacements are decent but they never managed to completely replace the advanced functionalities YaST provided. YaST was an all-in-one tool and I remember many users just installed OpenSUSE because of its easy system management with YaST.
I'm still wondering, why they dropped YaST for these less efficient and more complex tools. Also with their slower package manager and YaST replacement, many users now have a reason to consider another distro maybe. But OpenQA is still there, which is awesome.
Conclusion
OpenSUSE is for someone who wants rolling release but never wants to break their system at any point. With much simpler configurations and out of the box decent tweaks I recommend this distribution for everyone including everyday users, developers, gamers, etc.
While many other distributions struggle to maintain various desktop environments like KDE, XFCE and GNOME, OpenSUSE gives a much more stable and up-to-date experience with all three out of the box
The stability comes from OpenQA, an automated testing framework that other rolling distributions like Arch, CachyOS, EndeavourOS, etc. lack.
You must install OpenSUSE once in your life and there ends your distribution-hopping.
Thank you for reading.