After a couple years on Fedora I decided to do one more Distro hop- to one I have little experience with, openSUSE.
But it seems the everything from the installer, philosophy, package manager, configs, and general way of working is just very different than every Distro I’ve tried before (Debian/*Buntu, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo)
Like what’s up with YaST? It’s like a system-wide settings/configs program plus a package manager front end unique to openSUSE?
And to update grub it seems the best command is “update-bootloader” - for example. This isn’t standard on anything else afaik. Is there anywhere other than practice I can learn all of these quirks?
Why? Because it works and is reliable. I’ve been using Opensuse now for ten years on a server and it updated through all the releases over the years without problems. The machine is getting retired now, though. But the replacement will get Leap again for sure.
My Leap hasn’t been running for so long but knowing it will be supported for a long time and just having one yast command to make weekly automatic patches is just a nice feeling. The only problem I had is that python 3.7 is the default which makes some applications harder to run since I have to define python 3.11(also installed) manually but it’s really not that big of a problem.
openSUSE is one of the old desktop oriented distros. I find it somehow similar to the old glorious Mandrake (r.i.p.). Like it it’s a European distro and both of them are relatively KDE centric and so also somehow similar to Windows. So the philosophy behind both of them is to be user friendly in the way you can do relatively much with the central configuration panel.
What do you mean by “a European distro”?
Both have their origin in Europe. openSUSE has its origins in Germany, that’s why it is still very popular there. Mandrake had its roots im France.
I’m more curious of the implications. Is KDE considered more popular in Europe?
I think so. GNOME is more an American thing what you can see from its similarities to the Mac OS desktop layout which is still not that popular in Europe. KDE is also a German project and more similar to the Windows layout. And Windows in the last time often steals ideas from KDE^^
People always say GNOME is more like macOS - but as someone who really likes the macOS UI I really cannot stand GNOME3. I’ve tried but I just can’t do it
But Flatpak is very European. And KDE Kirigami is very Asian. Shall we call it best of world model? 🤭
So would the American package format be .gun and take up way more space then needed
Hahaha, .biggun is more appropriate.
As we can see this in battlestations all the time and of course the American flag and the Texas flag on the wall.
I always had the impression that OpenSuse and especially KDE is most popular in Germany.
I must admit I’ve mostly been an Ubuntu user since about 2007. But switching to Tumbleweed was like a breath of fresh air. A lot of the things were different, but accumulated experience over years allowed me to feel at home. I used YaST once or twice, you don’t need it at all.
https://doc.opensuse.org/ is going to probably be your best bet
It’s just what you’re used to. To me fedora seems weird and I don’t know why people choose it over opensuse. To me opensuse feels like home.
Also yast is great and I don’t get why more distros don’t have a similar thing.
I’ve actually come full circle (as of yesterday) back to SUSE. I began using Linux around 2002. My first two distros were discovered out of frustration with my horrible Windows XP upgrade experience. Long story short, my first experience with Linux was Red Hat (probably 2.*) and SUSE Linux (both purchased in boxes). Since then I’ve used Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch, Mandrake (memories), and just about every flavor in between. I’ve never messed with Gentoo or Slackware, but I’ve been around. That said, I’m currently finding my return to openSUSE to be a breath of fresh air. I may have rediscovered my new OS home (at least for a while). It’s definitely different, but give it time, I suppose. It may grow on you… or maybe not.
Most modern distros are either new distro trying to have more modern sensibilities, distros based off of Debian, Arch, or Fedora, or occasionally original things that are okay with being superficially similar to one of those while doing things differently at lower levels. OpenSUSE is one of the few remaining distros from the olden days that has been independent and doing their own thing for decades without spawning a bunch of forks or dying off. If you want to try something even older and crazier Slackware is sure an experience.
you may not know this, but suse was originally based off of slackware way, way, waaaaay back in the day before changing over to a jurix base.
Slackware’s package manager doesn’t even do dependency resolution. I respect the fact that it’s managed to keep existing this long and that so much of what it did inspired other distros, but I honestly have no idea why anyone would use it in 2023. Imo dependency resolution is the main reason to even have a package manager, without that I might as well install everything by cloning random git repos. If you want packages compiled from source, why not just use Gentoo (or Source Mage? Idk much about it, but I read through their website and it seems neat).
That being said, if anyone uses Slackware, I’d love to know why. It’s survived this long, surely it must be doing something right.
I use it because 22 years ago it was more appealing than redhat or Mandrake. It forced me to learn more about Linux because I had to resolve almost everything myself than any other distro. I was using before it had a package manager and honestly after the dependency hell of rpms in 2000s it just seemed more problematic to use one that resolved dependencies than not. Usually I used to and sometimes still use it for a nice base to compile everything on. I dunno. It’s my Linux equivalent to my first car that I loved.
Always has been.
But to be fair, openSUSE was my first linux distro after Windows and YaST had been helpful to me before I learned how to use console commands. And then I switched to another distro.
You could read the docs.
