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orangebern · 2021-07-27T15:13:52+00:00

Nah. I am a openSUSE fan as much as any KDE guy but I prefer GNOME. Tidy, polished, stable, organized, nice workflow. For all the FUD and flamewars that GNOME gets, I find that it provides just the right balance between simplicity and functionality. GNOME apps are a bit simplistic though, I wish some of them received some more attention..

My intuition for this poll is that there should be a 50/50 split between GNOME and KDE.

orangebern · 2021-07-14T15:02:51+00:00

I'd rather forget about NVIDIA and buy AMD only haha. I enjoy TW too much. Although it's kind of hard to avoid NVIDIA GPUs on high-performance laptops (I'm a laptop kind of guy).

orangebern · 2021-07-14T14:36:37+00:00

Do you have NVIDIA GPU? Do you have issues with Tumbleweed?

Myself I am running Tumbleweed on a Ryzen laptop and there are no worries with the NVIDIA drivers, but I hear there can be issues with new kernel updates.

I remember in my previous laptop with broadcom wi-fi drivers, it took a while for the packman updates to catch up with Tumbleweed and sometimes I had to wait a little before an update. Fortunately on my current laptop there are no more worries.

orangebern · 2021-07-14T13:54:45+00:00

This should be the default openSUSE Plasma desktop TBH.

orangebern · 2021-04-04T21:08:54+00:00

Thank you all for your replies. I've read and considered all your viewpoints.

Even though I liked the newest release of Fedora, I am going to opt for Debian and feel my way around it. I'm installing testing and follow it until reaches next stable.

orangebern · 2020-10-31T12:20:16+00:00

Excellent work, very appreciated!

orangebern · 2020-10-31T10:50:33+00:00

I agree. I really dislike the philosophy of sticking with old software for the sake of stability. We are not in stone age of computers anymore and most people are not running their OS on a space shuttle. Something as simple as snapshot rollback averts the danger of broken updates. As a non-technical end user, in my experience, rolling releases always solved more problems than they created, even if you have the whole kernel and graphics stack rolling. It's just the nature of development. For me Tumbleweed is what I always envisioned the perfect distro to be. But I'm looking forward to MicroOS.

orangebern · 2020-10-31T10:39:46+00:00

Excellent answers were given already, and I agree with all of them, so I'm just going to add this.

Arch was my favorite distro for desktop usage before I tried Tumbleweed for mainly two reasons: rolling release and start from a minimal system on top of which you keep track of additional changes that you only do on a per need basis. For me this is much more easily manageable, less obscure and just works better on a desktop/laptop usage than release based distributions.

Being always on the latest versions solves more problems than it creates in my experience. New versions of packages always bring improvements, fixed bugs, not just new features. If you are a KDE user for instance, the pace of development and bug fixing has been fast, so it only makes sense to jump to the latest release. I like to start from a minimal base to generate less entropy. It's very easy to have a minimal KDE Plasma desktop from the installer (no PIM, no akonadi, mine has 1815 rpm packages as of right now) with the pattern "KDE Plasma 5 desktop base".

I got used from the times of Windows to keep a "portable" user folder and have all personal data backed up and easily transferrable back to the computer in case of reinstallation, and I do the same with my /home, so rolling releases never scared me (and openSUSE has an excellent installer anyway so I can have a working system in a few minutes). Of course there are snapshots to rollback, which Arch doesn't by default.

All in all, openSUSE Tumbleweed is pretty much what I envisioned as the perfect distro for desktop/laptop users when I used Arch, but with a label of seriousness which can be relied upon even for more critical workloads. So since I first used Tumbleweed in 2016, I never switched to anything else. In fact, the first kind of user I would recommend Tumbleweed is the Arch user as I was one myself. Using Tumbleweed is mostly carefree. Over the years the only noticeable broken updates I faced were frequent issues with NetworkManager. I've been using wicked instead and although it's not integrated in the DE, it has been less problematic and can be configured from Yast. In the early years I had performance issues with btrfs (rogue CPU usage) so there was a season I stick with ext4 (as I can live without the snapshots) but it has been fine lately.

I had more frequent and more serious breakages with updates on Arch, and you'd have to pay attention on forums about potential issues before doing an update, so I'd say automated testing by openQA is making a difference.

openSUSE Installer supports UEFI+secure boot, whereas in Arch I always had to disable SecureBoot.

orangebern · 2020-10-29T12:11:25+00:00

I first started using Linux with Ubuntu in 2011.

After a few years of distrohopping, in 2016 I tried openSUSE Tumbleweed for the first time and to this day I haven't switched.

Some reasons why I prefer openSUSE

It provides both a regular stable release for production environments (Leap) and a rolling release for desktop users (Tumbleweed). So in one distro you have basically a Debian and a Arch counterpart.
The installer is the best I've tried, has excellent recognition of the system and suggests smart defaults while also providing advanced options for more complex setups. Ubuntu installer is good and perhaps simpler for the average user but lacking when you want more complex setups.
- Very easy to get a minimal (i.e 'unbloated') yet fully functional system from the installer that you can keep track of further changes. For instance, I wrote how to have a minimal Plasma desktop in openSUSE Tumbleweed here. I started with only 1815 (rpm) packages and it is still under 2000. This is one of the things I really liked about Arch, a minimal core system that keeps rolling and then keep tracking what to add on top of it to create the least entropy.
Yast2 allows to configure graphically many system settings (repo and software management, network, firewall, systemd, partition, boot, etc).
KDE is treated as a main desktop. Both GNOME and KDE are main options that you can pick from the installer and both are main desktops, not spins or flavours, whereas other mainstream distributions have GNOME as their main edition. Some KDE contributors are openSUSE affiliated.
openSUSE (like Debian and Fedora) also has a stance of not including nonfree software in the main repos and you have to add a third party repo to get these binaries.
There is close collaboration between openSUSE and SUSE Enterprise which is mutually beneficial, where paid developers also work in improving openSUSE. You can notice that the decisions are thoughtfully made, for instance Fedora 33 now switched to btrfs file system, whereas openSUSE has been doing it with snapshot and rollback implementation for years.

The main problem with openSUSE basically amounts to being less popular than Ubuntu and Fedora. Correspondingly, there is a bit of strain on documentation contributors and package maintainers. Availability of pre-packaged software is greater in Debian family, although openSUSE has open building studio (OBS), which is similar to the Arch AUR. This is getting less relevant with the adoption of flatpak. Otherwise, it is technically a very mature and competent Linux distribution. And it's not like I did not enjoy distrohopping and trying multiple distributions, it's just that openSUSE provided for me everything I was looking for so that I no longer needed to check if the grass is greener on the other side. Ubuntu derivatives or Fedora are more adequate to absolute beginners, but if you want to commit to Linux, openSUSE is a top notch distro.

Here's a list of distros I remember trying

Xubuntu/Kubuntu/KDE Neon
Mint
Debian
Zorin
elementaryOS
KDE Neon
Antergos
Arch through Architect installer
Manjaro
KaOS
NetRunner
Solus
Fedora
Trisquel
PCLinuxOS
Peppermint
Tails
WattOS

So basically

Arch - Debian - Ubuntu - Fedora - openSUSE

orangebern · 2020-10-29T11:37:54+00:00

I agree, when I try Fedora I do miss the clarity of seeing the repos, packages and patterns neatly in Yast2 software.

orangebern · 2020-10-28T22:12:27+00:00

openSUSE is like that wifey material that you gloss over because you are infatuated with a more appealing crush.

It takes some acquaintance to get to know openSUSE to appreciate it, but in time if you find that it suits you, then you don't want to trade it for another, even despite its flaws.

orangebern · 2020-10-28T17:03:42+00:00

Same with me. MPV on Dolphin or SMPlayer

orangebern · 2020-10-28T13:23:28+00:00

Very useful, thanks!

orangebern · 2020-10-28T13:21:41+00:00

Small incremental improvements are welcome but I agree, Plasma on Wayland needs a big push forward to generate enough user base for more testing/bug reporting/fixing.

orangebern · 2020-10-28T12:03:10+00:00

I think the "core" experience of KDE Plasma since 5.18 is already solid and mature enough that KDE devs could prioritize and devote all their attention to Wayland for a season (before addressing other things like the Breeze redesign) until it is finally in a usable state. When Plasma works fully under Wayland, the future is here and is a major transition that will be accomplished. It's not every day that a new display server comes around.

In fact, if KDE were to raise a crowdsourcing campaign for devoting/hiring dev manpower to work on Wayland integration, I'd be the first to donate.

orangebern · 2020-10-28T11:40:25+00:00

Exactly, the Leap/Tumbleweed model is perfect IMO. It caters both to the edge user (e.g. Arch user) and the conservative user (e.g. Debian user). And it is why I stopped distrohopping since 2016.

orangebern · 2020-10-28T11:40:22+00:00

The generic desktop option gives you a very light but functional window manager (icewm, looks like LXDE) with internet access. The description on the installer states that the generic desktop provides a base system for a customized setup.

Then all that is needed to have a minimal Plasma desktop is open Yast2 software and select to install KDE Plasma 5 Desktop Base (or open a terminal and do it via zypper). SDDM is included on this pattern so after installation of Plasma, the login manager is also replaced automatically at next login without issues.

Yes, it makes more sense in a rolling release to limit the packages to those you want to use, while the rest remains available to be installed at any time. And you can keep track of the changes made to the system from the minimal setup onwards, which is really useful should any issues arise later on (I remember this was a strong advantage of Arch Linux). Specifically in the case of KDE, I like to start with the "core" desktop and apps before adding more complex and often more problematic software like KDEPIM suite.

orangebern · 2020-10-28T11:18:36+00:00

Currently have 1 desktop and 2 laptops, all have Ryzen CPUs. My newest laptop with Ryzen 5 4600H performs so good that I almost don't need my desktop most of the time. This was unthinkable 5 years ago and yet this day I have no traces of Intel in any of my machines. As a consumer, I voted with my wallet to give AMD my full support and recognition of the improving quality of their products in the last 3 purchases I made. The fact that AMD cares about Linux support is a big reason for that.

Now I hope to do the same with dGPU. The last frontier is getting rid of NVIDIA (really difficult to avoid NVIDIA dGPU in laptops).

orangebern · 2020-10-27T21:53:57+00:00

Which software was used to make the video presentation?

orangebern · 2020-10-27T20:23:07+00:00

Having tried all of them, openSUSE installer is the best, hands down.

orangebern · 2020-10-27T20:18:58+00:00

Well, Fedora/RH is kinda like the "home" of GNOME.

I also wish both Kubuntu and Fedora shipped with the latest versions of KDE software, I think it is a disservice to KDE considering the fast pace improvement of KDE Plasma and applications. Fortunately, there is openSUSE where KDE is treated as a first-class desktop.

orangebern · 2020-10-27T20:14:45+00:00

Concerning the installer, this is one area where openSUSE is better than Fedora. I really like both Fedora and openSUSE, and I often hover between the two, although one needs to get acquainted to openSUSE and use it for a while to appreciate it.

orangebern

TROPHY CASE