OpenSuse is such a mystery to me. In Debian, I know it’s community run and there’s a thousand developers all over the world and they vote and discuss everything. Ubuntu is corporate and that’s easy to understand too. But OpenSuse? They say it’s a community distro, but my (uneducated) feeling is that the community is like four Suse employees. Is there actually a community of developers? What is OpenSuse? If someone knows I’d like to know what it’s like from the inside.
Here’s a page from OpenSuse’s website that links to some really interesting interviews with people who contribute to the project:
https://people.opensuse.org/index.html
Quote from interview with Ludwig:
Q: Three words to describe openSUSE? Or make up a proper slogan! A: Lots of fun!
Q: What do you think the future holds for openSUSE? A: The future is unwritten. As long as we have brilliant people we will see new ideas we haven’t thought about before.
Q: If you would have unlimited resources, what would you do with it? A: What kind of resources?
Q: Let’s say you have money to hire a thousand people to work on openSUSE. Who would you hire and what would you let them do? A: Finally fix RPM, printing and KDE? :-)
Q: Star Trek or Star Wars? A: Star Trek.
Q: Torvalds or Stallman? A: Pfft.
Interesting, thank you. I started reading through and realized there are no newer interviews than 8 years ago. And two of the three most recent interviews are of Suse employees. This kind of reinforces my feeling to be honest.
Love openSUSE! Been using tumbleweed with gnome for quite a bit and it’s probably the best experience I have had with an operating system so far!
Tried Arch, Debian flavors, Nix, Fedora, and many of the other popular distros and they are all pretty darn good but the lizard Linux takes the cake for me! Highly recommend!
Currently using Fedora, what am I missing out on compared to suse?
For me it’s specifically tumbleweed and it’s great features. It’s a rolling release distro so all the newest packages, easy to setup, utilizes a btrfs file system (Fedora does this also) for easy rollbacks if something does break. And despite it being a rolling distro I have yet to have something actually break.
YAST can be nice sometimes as well but I tend to use terminal commands, however it’s great for those who prefer a GUI, especially new folk.
One con I will list is package availability. It’s repositories are a bit smaller than most of the other major distros and sometimes flatpaks or directly downloading rpms are needed but it’s fairly rare for me at least.
So far my experience on it has been great for gaming, development, and just casual use. Highly recommend it to newbies and older Linux folks alike.
YAST. Personally, I think it’s ass, but some people insist that it’s OpenSUSE’s killer software.
Yeast isn’t bad but really Opensuse brings a really stable rolling release and the open build service. Leap is very stable and makes a great desktop. Plasma is great. Like most things it isnt for all uses but I’ve had Tumbleweed for years as my desktop OS and love it.
IMHO any Linux distribution will be a good change from Windows and Mac if you are trying to divest from US products.
Even if they are not european, they are open source.
The Linux Foundation might be based in California, but I still very much consider it to be Finnish. And Torvalds is, thankfully, very much on the anti-fascist side of the spectrum.
Luckily the Linux Foundation stuff (having to obey US sanctions on Russian companies) affected those specific devs and not really users or anyone else.
Linux Mint is technically an Irish based distro, as well.
SuSE was a blessing for me in the 1990s when you couldn’t just download huge amount of data over the Internet. But I could walk into my local computer store and buy a 8 CD package with two big handbooks for 70 Deutschmarks.
Long story short: Without SuSE I might not be a software developer today, so I’m thankful even though I prefer other distros today. 🦎
A: I will always support SUSE, even if I don’t use it myself.
B: Any Linux can be considered an international effort.
C: If you want to avoid American evil corp distros, skip RedHat (IBM) and Oracle. Maybe avoid Ubuntu and Pop!_OS too, but they are not in the same Evil Cyberpunk Megacorp level as IBM and Oracle.
Why not go 100 percent corporation free? https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
These distros reject everything that is not free as in free speech. This means no binary drivers, no binary firmware, no binary software. While this is very idealistic, not in a bad way, it might be impractical for most people. Start with an “easy” Linux, you can always go the hardcore way afterwards.
The idiocy goes beyond rejecting non-free software. For example, Debian ticks all the boxes needed to be added to that list but it’s not due to the fact that they dare to have a repository with non-free software that isn’t even included in the OS.
Been using it for a few months now and it’s great. I haven’t had any major problems with it. YAST is an awesome tool so I rarely had to use console commands to change/fix stuff. And filesystem snapshots are very well integrated so that one time I did fuck up and the system wouldn’t boot (it was entirely my fault) it was very easy to roll back changes.
Yast and the snapshots are exactly what has kept me on it the most. Borked install after zypper dup? No problem! Rollback!
Not as comfortable with command line? Yast it is!
Still confusing sometimes, and sometimes how “locked down” it is makes my tasks a little harder, but solid and stable win at the end of the day!
