You never hear much about OpenSuse or Suse, but whenever you do, users seem very happy with it. Is it just a perspective thing, or is there another reason why it isn't huge like Ubuntu or Fedora?
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I am a Suse convert and I advocate loudly for it mostly because you don’t hear much about it, so passion compensates for mindshare. Yast, Zypper, microos (a transactional update rolling spin) are all fantastic products and I’m a huge fan of Tumbleweed gaming systems because you get all of the newest updates for Mesa, Vulcan, etc....and because of the openQA system things are generally better tested than they are in Arch.
Tumbleweed got Gnome 40 stable before Fedora 34 was released and it’s been rock solid for me since day 1. And updates are generally extremely safe because if an update breaks your system you can just rollback to a previous Btrfs snapshot with one command and a reboot, wait a bit and issues are fixed very quickly.
> microos (a transactional update rolling spin)
While it was intended for servers, if you set it up right it can be an openSuSE equivalent of Fedora Silverblue, even better if you prefer Plasma as I do. It takes a little work to get to an exact equivalent (IIRC toolbox had to be installed and some extra set up after install).
Also to note, if you don't want a rolling version, Leap does offer a transactional server option in the installer.
Yes, I've tested out the Gnome version of their transactional-update based Desktop. It was a generally good experience but I remember having issues with certain packages and ended up going back to regular Tumbleweed, but I'm hopeful for the future as it's very close to what I want out of the box - will definitely give it another try the future.
I'm using a transactional-update based leap server for a container host right now and it's been awesome - I just upgraded it to 15.3 and seems to be working just fine as well.
The only bad thing about the transactional server, and IIRC openSuSe doesn't mention it anywhere last I saw, is that you can't break up your root filesystem other than /home.
I had installed / on an nvme drive which my BIOS doesn't boot from, so I have /boot on a separate partition. Breaks on every kernel update (although trivial to fix).
It's a nice OS, but my biggest pet peeve is that it doesn't come with h264 repos installed [0]. One has to first add them otherwise one won't be able to play most videos or music in your browser. Some configuration is therefore necessary and I can't just install it in 15 minutes then hand it over to the owner.
It's a pity because the fastest way to scare the average user away from Linux is to force them to open a shell in order to have a working setup. Hopefully that's something that'll change.
As a technical user, I enjoy it though. YaST is great for configuring many parts of the system, the documentation is great and it's stable. If Nix ever gets usable, I might give it a shot, but it's OpenSuse all the way for now [1]
[0]: https://en.opensuse.org/Additional_package_repositories
Yes, you need a repo from Packman. Less than 15 minutes to set that up if you know what you are doing. Yeah, if you don't install a new machine frequently you will have forgotten the details until the next time. And some guides on the net are not as good as others. Haven't done it myself for many months, so once again I don't remember it in detail.
I guess the reason is that their corporate lawyers tell them that they must not do it. There might be patent issues buried in that code.
Doesn’t Ubuntu require you to manually install restricted extras, and fedora needs rpm fusion. I don’t see how this is more advantageous than just enabling packman in yast and switching the packages over with a single click.
I think no longer. I installed a new Xubuntu a bit more than a year ago and so far all videos from the Web and they few DVDs I have watched did just work. I was a bit surprised by that.
You can technically add the repos through Yast, but I agree, it's a pain.
Could be because it's European.
openSUSE has a nice pacing, it's new enough to be a great platform but it's not changing so quickly you need a fresh installation every handful of months or you're constantly fixing things. The tooling is good as well, there are some aesthetic things I kind of dislike (like some of the config files in /etc should be a layer deeper, ATMO) but it works well and it's well made. Major upgrades tend to work and aren't that scary.
The transactional system versions (MicroOS and then TW can be installed as "transactional") are potentially game changers. The snapper integration with btrfs and grub makes a really compelling case if you've ever needed it; btrfs seems like it's getting closer and closer.
This is my interpretation: If you go back to when RHEL was spawned, there were sort of two distinct styles of Linux systems, they were very much and east coast and west coast sort of style. UNIX dorks may disagree with this, but SuSe has provided something more like a European style. They have tools for updating configuration files and they provide some opinions on how things should be run. Once you get used to it and in to it, it's nice.
Well it is huge, but more in Europe, i seen many Big Corp's using SLES, an nearly everyone who uses SAP.