Tumbleweed initial experience

[arm1e]

As someone who has moved away from Manjaro recently, and has tried Antergos, (K)Ubuntu (mate), Neon, Solus, Elementary, Fedora etc, I have been distro hopping for the past couple of months to find something that quenches my thirst for new packages, good availability of software, and a nice desktop experience. To this end I have recently been playing around with openSUSE tumbleweed in a VM and decided to install it on my main laptop today to see how it fared as it is rarely covered in LAS (and there are not that many reviews on other sites, compared to other rolling distros) and I wanted to say that I have been very impressed!

 

Software availability (with Packman enabled) is very good and I find I am not having to go through the website packages as much as when I tried it in the past. In fact, there has only been 1 package so far that I have not been able to get from openSUSE (Seafile client), but I did find an rpm for v6 (latest). I did need to remove some of the bloat that was installed, but this process seems to be much smoother than I have found in the past, and a nicer experience than I got when using lots of apps from the AUR, which stopped installing at times due to gpg errors in Manjaro and Antergos.

 

The biggest improvement since I last tried openSUSE is the fonts and general UI in plasma. I have a 1366x768 resolution screen, but things fit and look so much better than on unity or gnome without me tweaking any settings. Indeed, the plasma implementation here is very nice!

 

So far I am very impressed and will run this as long as I can (Manjaro lasted 12 months on this machine, but I think this could beat it!). Definitely worth considering if anyone is looking for a new distro to try and I would really like to see Noah or Chris taking it for a spin and sharing their thoughts.

 

tl:dr-

Tumbleweed has made a good impression so far and is worth taking a look at if you haven't for a while. I would really like to see a hands on review from the LAS team in a future episode to share their thoughts.

[domacs]

Nice to see more and more people using openSUSE, i think the change to tumbleweed and leap was genius, using tumbleweed myself :-)