🦎 Why OpenSUSE Is Awesome And You Should Give It A Try!

General Computing
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260px-744px-OpenSUSE_Logo

Meow,

I drive OpenSUSE every day at work/home and wanted to share why this particular distribution is so excellent.

The OpenSUSE Community

The OpenSUSE community is by far the most heartwarming, helpful, friendly, and happy Linux community I have come across in recent years. Almost everyone to whom I had a chance of speaking, was super passionate & enthusiastic about this distribution.
I never have been a witness to OpenSUSE users considering themselves as “The Elite” unlike many inside the Arch Linux Community for example.

OpenSUSE Is A True Community-Driven Distro

OpenSUSE can take the crown for delivering what people want. I have witnessed a lot of communities complain about changes made by the developers in their favorite distro after an update. OpenSUSE delivers to user expectations and is truly community driven.

Ultra Solid, Ultra Stable, Ultra Balanced OS

Thanos would be happy. Firstly, let’s keep in mind that OpenSUSE is the second oldest actively developed Linux distribution, it has years of developing towards perfection under the hood.
By that, if you like to tinker with your OS, expect OpenSUSE not to give up on you easily. Want multiple desktop environments? Challenge it, it will not fail you.

Fun Fact: OpenSUSE Mascot Is A Chameleon Named “Geeko”, It can’t get more badass!!!

Perfect For Beginners & Advanced Geeks

OpenSUSE is super easy to install(offering a very unique and intuitive isoInstaller, different from what you usually find) and offers a great out-of-the-box experience- The support for various hardware is excellent and you won’t have to do much setting up. Advanced users might consider the distro a little bloaty due to some preinstalled programs. Luckily we can remove them very quickly using YAST, which comes down to…

YAST- The Hidden Gem Of OpenSUSE

YAST is the best control center ANY OS in the world has ever had. No arguments there. You can control everything. It allows you to configure software management, containers, services, kernels, servers, hardware, networking, and a lot more. You can say it’s around 100 different applications in a single center. Everything. YaST gives you absolute power over your openSUSE installation, be it the enterprise edition or the personal installation. Convenient and everything is in one place. It’s magic.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed & Leap

OpenSUSE comes in two versions. Tumbleweed and Leap.
Tumbleweed is a rolling release that closely follows the OpenSUSE development cycle, just like Arch or Void. It offers more “bleeding-edge” packages like Arch, but the difference is that the packages are tested, reducing the risk of breaking something*.

*If you do break something, OpenSUSE has great intuitive BTRFS image rollback tools.

Leap releases a new version once in a while on a set schedule, similar to Ubuntu and Fedora. It focuses on having stable packages, meaning you could be running slightly older versions of software. However, it is super-duper-ultra-stable because of that.

EasterEgg OpenSUSE Music Video: https://youtu.be/sZDh3FE5YbE :tada: :musical_note:

To Be Continued In The Comments Below

What do you think about OpenSUSE? Will you give it a try? Do you have any questions? ASK!

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As a Fedora user… I extend the hand of friendship. I know the two communities have overlap in software and actual contributors. Nice to see openSUSE represented!

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OpenSUSE sounds good. Is it better than Linux Mint. I have a new out of the box laptop. I need simple step by step instructions on how to convert to the best Linux distro.

Because my laptop is pre-installed with windows 11,will big,bad,billy boy gates spy on me?. (I’m banned from posting comments on youtube for saying that) ofcourse the only way to have 100% security and privacy is by never using the internet. Which OS system is the most secure and private— onion,tor or tails?.

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Yes, I love openSUSE. I’ve been tempted to switch to an immutable distro like Fedora Kinoite but as long as openSUSE can roll back any changes made in Yast and any packages changed or updated, it is basically unbreakable.

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openSUSE Aeon or Kalpa maybe?

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I prefer Fedora’s approach. A base image and you layer your RPMs if needed. (Flatpak and Toolbox/Distrobox of course being the preferred methods.) Kalpa/Aeon can’t layer RPMs, you use transactional-update and you will end up with configuration drift until one day something breaks and nobody can help you. So you basically have to use Distrobox for everything not available as a Flatpak. And sometimes, layering an RPM would be much more convenient than using Distrobox.

Example: installing virt-manager.

On OpenSUSE Aeon/Kalpa: set up two distroboxes, one with --root --init for libvirt and ssh, one for virt-manager to connect to the first distrobox. (https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/run_libvirt_in_distrobox.md)

On Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite: install the needed packages using rpm-ostree (caveat: unlike dnf, rpm-ostree can’t install the Virtualization group so you need to look up which packages are in the group and install those). Alternatively, you can still use Distrobox to do the same as above.

On OpenSUSE Leap/Tumbleweed: Yast → Virtualization → Install Hypervisor & Tools → KVM, KVM tools. You don’t even need to touch the terminal.

And these papercuts and workarounds are frequent. Aeon/Kalpa doesn’t even support AppImages by default because the Aeon developer apparently hates the AppImage main developer. So you need to install libfuse2 (or similar), either with transactional-update or in a distrobox. I tried the latter and it worked until the next update happened and then the AppImage refused to start. It’s just tiring in my opinion, unless everything is available as a Flatpak one day.

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Fair enough. I agree rpm-ostree is the best implementation of an immutable system I’ve seen so far.

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Well i think Nobara Linux is easier than both of these distributions in my use cast you should make another distribution chart for forks like endeavour os and pop os

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Like this? (it is a huge chart) :slightly_smiling_face:

For newer linux users focused primarily or solely on gaming, I can see the appeal. But beyond that probably not, Nobara is just Fedora with a bunch of tweaks and pre-configuration intended to appeal to gamers new to Linux, as well as lesser security compared to Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, etc.

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Fedora’s rpm-ostree approach appeals to me for a couple reasons. I can’t say I understand it in depth but the base image + layering approach seems more robust and consistent / hard to break over time, and being able to rebase is just a really cool feature.

That said how OpenSUSE’s approach has some advantages too (1) Distrobox instead of toolbox (2) snapper is pre-installed and configured (3) Some of the prominent developers and contributors are quite active in the community, and helpful.

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Yeah kinda likes the list you provided and i understand that nobara is less secure than opensuse tumbleweed but its just that both it and Fedora are better for secure oses

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I think you may have the terms mildly confused. The onion network is the main feature of Tor and the Tor Browser. Neither are operating systems. Tor works by relaying your traffic through three nodes in the next work to anonymize your internet traffic. Although Tor is frequently used by cyber criminals, Tor is also really good for people fighting censorship from their government. It also allows journalists to speak out in countries where they would be prosecuted for their speech. Tor is also extremely difficult to block by governments due to things like bridges. Bridges are community run servers that act as a special unlisted entrance to the onion network. Snowflake is another type of bridge that disguises traffic so it looks like Web RTC (so it looks like any other video conferencing platform, like Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams)

Tails is an operating system. It uses the onion network to route the entire operating system traffic (compared to just the browser traffic with the Tor Browser) through Tor nodes, thus attempting to anonymize your entire system’s traffic. Tails also completely wipes anything you were doing on the system when you unplug the USB or shut it down. (Unless it is in persistent storage)

I would only really recommend daily driving Tails under very extreme threat models. Because your traffic is going through multiple proxies, it can sometimes be extremely slow, which is an annoyance to some people. Also all Tor exit node IPs are public, and many sites restrict Tor visitors or place extra anti-bot measures.

In conclusion, Tor is a great way to stay anonymous and is really the only feasible option right now for people who want little chance of their actions being tided back to them. (I know things like I2P are growing, but they have not yet reached a large user base) Tor is great for activities you want to hide from your ISP, government, or hide your identity from the websites you are visiting. Although I wouldn’t recommend it as a daily driver for most people, having tails or similar counterparts on a thumb stick and using it for dark web stuff or hiding from your government.

2 Likes