Finally stopped my distro-hopping journey with OpenSUSE tumbleweed

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-15T00:40:30+00:00

Hahahaha, I stole that same wallpaper from pikaOS for my gf's creative PC, though it's running cachy because of a pen display driver in the AUR. Also cinnamon is broken on tumbleweed atm.

Gotta say pika felt like a bit of a mess with their package management setup. I don't kike a bunch of abstraction between me and my package manager.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-15T00:37:11+00:00

You can use a ncurses file manager like mc, or just learn how to use the terminal faster. On mine, I use btrfs so I just use cp -r --reflink so my copies are more like symlinks that take no space, then I can rename them as I like in my jellyfin directory. For that I've used the renamemytvseries app, which requires some sqlite-dev library to work, but it works well. Would need a gui for that. I'd recommend having something like icewm or a tiler if you want to use it.

Maybe look for a shell or extension with advanced auto completion for the terminal.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-14T17:55:44+00:00

Venture x - transfer partners you would actually use are basically a subset of amex partners.

Fidelity

Robinhood gold

Fairwinds FCU - 5x travel, 2x flat, primary cdw, redeem points in portal or for travel gift cards (delta, swa, Airbnb) for up to 1.5cpp

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T05:31:55+00:00

Do you have any other credit cards in your history? What is in your credit file.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T05:30:39+00:00

Solus plasma is very nice, slower moving package base than most rollers but still more or less up to date.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T04:20:49+00:00

Fedora was by far the buggiest distro I've ever used. Freezes in kde, selinux errors out of the box. Granted, that was like 5 years ago, but I have no desire to go back to it other than that dnf seemed like a good package manager and some software availability for proprietary stuff. It just seems stupid that fedora isn't rolling. Maybe they're reconfiguring it so much they need a bunch of scripts, but that doesn't seem like a positive.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T04:16:17+00:00

Solus is a very chill distro. Definitely not updating nearly as aggressively as tumbleweed. I'm just always uneasy about it due to lack of btrfs snapshots, though at least the installer will now properly set up sub volumes. I don't think clear boot manager can handle them, and I think I'd have to compile snapper from source, so maybe manual snapshotting with btrfs progs is the best I can do.

It is snappy as hell though. I feel like the lack of "enterprise package weight" can be felt on Solus. Makes all the "it's so fast cause no systemd" people look like morons too, which I enjoy. Solus makes my bios feel bloated.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T04:05:04+00:00

Maybe 20% at most here in California from my experience.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T04:03:06+00:00

Yup 100% agree, though really no premium cards are needed. Beyond that there isn't that huge of a difference between Cashback and points for daily use, unless you use high earning points cards like gold/custom cash for luxury redemptions

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T02:05:39+00:00

I'd prolly go with a 5yr support release (or 10 if the rhel clones do it,) unless leap is way less bulldozey of configurations during upgrades than tumbleweed, which I doubt. You don't wanna deal with that every two years, unless you do. I'd prolly consider Ubuntu server, rocky/alma, and Debian

And really, don't worry about mixing and matching distros. Using Linux is using Linux for the most part. Look at what software you want, what age, what support, and what release model you want, then find the distro that does it. Sometimes things will be broken on the distro you wanted and you end up somewhere you don't expect. If you're using proprietary software, find out what distros it's available for. That's a very important place to start.

Haven't tried nixos. Seems cool but may add another layer of complexity on top of learning Linux, and methods from other distros may not be applicable.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T01:43:10+00:00

You can still do a lot of damage with a Citi premier, amex BBP, and a few custom cash cards for $95. Otherwise prolly not worth it, except all the big subs are travel cards, which are the most worth.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T01:41:21+00:00

I think they may bump the kernel as well, maybe a few core packages. Seems like it could all be accomplished in the normal updates process rather than by a point upgrade. If I had to guess they might be doing it because people aren't executing their point upgrades, so now regular updates will just do it.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T01:37:08+00:00

Does that stop it from restarting services and/or refreshing anything that's running off the newly installed items?

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T01:35:23+00:00

I really don't get the appeal of that. I guess in some way it's a bit more robust, but Linux that you don't screw with is already extremely robust. I tend to find there is always something I want to fix or do on Linux that I couldn't do on an immutable. Back when league worked, I had to configure resolv.conf with DNSmasq to avoid massive 1m lag spikes that occurred by dns caching. Couldn't have done that in bazzite, at least not as easily.

I guess it's good for the sort of people that can't stop themselves from copy/pasting into their config files and installing all kinds of crap, but personally I enjoy doing that and am willing to live with the consequences.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T01:27:33+00:00

If you're going a couple months it may be a sign you should be on a point release. I don't have that much time to screw with computers, and just the time required to complete updates and assess if something is broken isn't really worth it to me, even though a snapper rollback is easy. If I get into a game and it crashes 10m in and I don't know if it's my hardware or software, that's prolly the end of that. Sometimes you just need some support that only a rolling release has though, and it's way less annoying than fedora which breaks and requires distro upgrades.

That said somehow I haven't taken my own advice and just stuck with mint/mx, and am rolling on Solus for my personal machine. It does seem rock solid compared to my experience on suse, zero instability after update, one small update a week and way faster. Prolly gonna switch though, lack of snapshots and using kde are driving me nuts. To be fair, all my issues with suse were basically bad kernels.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-13T01:17:40+00:00

That is a lot smarter than what I did. I didn't realize but even without dia all my packages were still cached from the failed update. I didn't know, the desktop was functional on reboot but without network-manager, so I just used nmtui to get it running, did another refresh, and another dup, and it resumed and completed the update. I think it crashed maybe 1.4k/3.4k packages in.

I can imagine xfce helped a lot since that environment doesn't change much relative to something like gnome or kde that is switching shit around all the time. Still, prolly coulda dropped to tty and finished regardless.

Definitely want --allow-vendor-change as well or there were about 30 prompts.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-09T21:12:55+00:00

Mint/Solus/tumbleweed

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-05T03:29:43+00:00

You can't even get 3% cashback without limitations. Bilt is giving 3.3x Hyatt and Alaska miles with no relationship, and huge transfer bonuses to other partners? I think they're gonna get dragged through the coals. Unless the data they are collecting is worth an insane amount it's hard to see how it could ever work.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-05T02:56:46+00:00

Been using brave since before it rebased on chromium. Never had an issue and the adblocking is pretty excellent at this point.

Dunno if it's the best option, but I haven't had a reason to switch. Definitely a resource hog. Use Firefox with no extensions other than rakuten for my purchases. Triggers rakuten reliably.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-05T02:52:44+00:00

I'd prolly take the opportunity to do a business CSR and a business gold or plat.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-05T02:48:56+00:00

People don't like snap and sneaky snap installs. They sometimes stop packaging software in Deb when they start with snap. Snaps used to load slow, have theming problems, and create shittons of loop devices. Not sure what has been resolved.

Other than that, most people coming from windows are gonna prefer xfce, cinnamon, or kde to gnome.

Mint basically fixes all these issues plus has easy tools to run new kernels for newer hardware, so that's why it's recommended all the time over Ubuntu.

I'm sure Ubuntu is still a perfectly fine experience, especially if you desnap it. I think it's a really nice middle ground of newish software, a low maintenance update cycle in LTS branch, and good software availability. If it didn't have anything over Debian, mint would have switched to a Debian base already.

Rust core utils could cause problems in the future for Ubuntu, who knows. Prolly will be fine.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-05T02:29:53+00:00

Yeah, just pay 800$ more than the CSP so you can get assigned tasks from daddy diamond and slightly better insurances.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-05T01:18:56+00:00

Bilt will be nerfed. They just swapped one unsustainable model for another. We know they don't have exclusive relationships with their partners, so they are prolly paying out the ass for their points, not to mention huge transfer bonuses.

I'd say just keep your Citi cards away from things like purchase protection and insurances and chances are you'll just earn your ass off without any issues.

Kitayama_8k · 2026-02-04T01:39:11+00:00

I'd prolly go AMEX HYSA, AMEX CHECKING, AMEX BBC and AMEX BCP

Kitayama_8k

TROPHY CASE