OpenSUSE Tumbleweed made me reconsider rolling release distros!

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#Linux #opensuse #linuxdistro

00:00 Intro
00:47 Sponsor: Check out AlmaLinux and TuxCare's support services
01:54 OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
02:53 Installer: not the best
05:47 Default desktop experience
06:42 Yast: managing software
08:39 Yast: configuring the system
12:50 Interesting things
14:40 Conclusion
16:13 Sponsor: Get a PC that runs Linux perfectly, with Tuxedo
17:12 Support the channel

It's a rolling release Linux distro, but they test everything thoroughly through their own build service.

Lets talk about the installer. First, you get a licence agreement.Y ou get very complete network settings, but they're not user friendly at all. Then you get to pick the role of your system: do you need a desktop, with GNOME, Plasma, or XFCE, a generic desktop for a minimal install, or a server. You can also get other desktop environments from the repos afterwards, like Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt, or even just a window manager, like i3.

OpenSUSE tumbleweed is one of the rare distros I installed using all its defaults that did NOT manage to give me a bootable system. I reinstalled it, this time carefully picking my partition layout, and this time it worked.

Once I managed to boot the system, I got a very vanilla GNOME experience, with GNOME 44. No extensions, no themes, it's the default experience, and that's great.

On KDE, there's a tiny bit more customization applied, with an OpenSUSE logo as the menu, and the titlebars defaulting to the breeze classic look, instead of the cleaner "regular" color scheme. It doesn't depart from the base KDE layout, it's still super vanilla.

Tumbleweed comes with a lot of preinstalled software, like Evolution, GIMP, LibreOffice, a few games, Tiger VNC, Transmission, and of course, the Yast utility. Flatpak is preinstalled, and flathub is enabled, which is really good.

Yast is a control center and setup utility that's been the mainstay of OpenSUSE for years, basically since its first version. It lets you configure your system in depth, way more than what the default settings in GNOME or KDE let you do.

So, first, Yast lets you manage software. You can add, remove or edit software repositories, and their GPG keys, and you can install packages or apply patches.

This opens a very complete graphical package manager that reminded me of Synaptic. You can install libraries, drivers, whatever is not available in GNOME Software or Discover. It's all RPM packages.

But YAST is also a super complete tool if you want to configure a lot of advanced settings graphically. Yast lets you configure the boot loader entirely, you also get a services manager, to let you enable, or disable various services that run in the background. There's a sysconfig graphical editor, to set various variables related to your desktop. And then there are security settings, for AppArmor, configuring the firewall, hardening the system by disabling or enabling various features and settings, and you can consult the logs, all graphically.

You can also manage printers and scanners, but, the built in tools for this are... not great.

And then there are things I don't think are really needed anymore in a separate tool, like the date and time settings, the language settings, the network settings, the partitioning tool, all of these have equivalents in the Plasma or GNOME desktops, and as far as I can tell, the Yast utilities don't do more than the built in tools.

Once I used it, I started to wonder why desktop environments don't give users access to these configs, or why there isn't a third party tool to manage these.

Tumbleweed also comes with a graphical btrfs snapshot manager: It lets you create or delete snapshots, which you'll be able to restore to revert your system to a usable state.

OpenSUSE also has a web portal to find and install applications.

[JeffHeon]

Please, don’t stop caring about “UI and UX and consistency.” I’m here for these insights!

[ArniesTech]

OpenSUSE gives me by far the most professional and no-bullshit vibes of all distros. Of course as a German I am rooting for SuSE 💪😁

[Racsu]

I love the fact that when you review a distro it's not the classic "the desktop looks good and works" review, you have your reasons to review it over the rest, in this case really focused on yast, good job!

[ktsmells]

A distro which needs more love from both the community and its developers. Just needs a bit more polish and it'd give Mint and Ubuntu some competition.

[BuriBuster]

Two corrections:
1) Yast network manager is nescessarry if you use wicked for networking. Only NetworkManager is supported in gnome/kde
2) Partitioner is way more in-depth than gnome disks/kparted, with things like full lvm, mdam or bcache configs.

Also, one thing worth mentioning (and why yast looks the way it does) is that it supports terminal ui via ncurses. Its awesome you can manage your server via ssh with gui application.

[Uma_Stellar]

I wish the flaws saw more public scrutiny... I'm glad you're talking about it. Thank you! You present a fair and accurate overview, I've used openSUSE Tumbleweed on my production machines for years. The only rolling distro for me.... Rock solid and cutting edge indeed

[glockguy]

Some of the things you found redundant in YAST are there because SuSE gets used on servers that don't have DE's. You can still use YAST at the command line then, or the tui, to easily configure some of the things that you won't have a DE to do it in, and since those YAST modules exist for the headless server administration, they'll show up on the GUI version too; Repetitive or not.

As for the installer not booting after install on the guided install- That one surprised me. I've done so many guided installs and not had an issue that I can't count.

The installation can be overwhelming. Perhaps they could hide more of the advanced options behind advanced tabs or buttons, but the power of the SuSE installer is quite insane, especially with partitions and volumes. I've done some pretty crazy btrfs on luks on lvm with lvm raid (or on top of md raid) that I never could have done with other distro installers. Before I switched to TW, a couple years ago, I used to have to do all that by hand prior to installing another distro.

[sprite_goblin]

One thing I do like about the installer is that when you get to the summary screen, there’s a blue link you can click under packages that takes you to the YaST package manager. From there you can manually select almost any package you would want that’s available in the Opensuse repos to be pre-installed. It also organizes them into categories for you and lets you choose to install minimal groups for GNOME and KDE (if you just want the desktop environment and main utilities)

[kuhluhOG]

13:55 Btw, if you used btrfs if you go and do an update, zypper automatically creates a snapshot for you.
So, if the updates somehow should bork the system: snapper rollback last
Or choose the second oldest snapshot before boot in Grub.

[crossatko]

This is what distro review should be, not the typical wallpaper comparision. Good job!

[SaxaphoneMan]

Tumbleweed has been fantastic for me so far, and I agree it is criminally underrated. 100% agree with the issues you brought up, and I hope, with SUSE getting a massive wave of new users lately, these problems get addressed. Absolutely agree with the conclusion, previously, Fedora seemed ideal to me for having stability while getting more updated packages, but after trying Tumbleweed, there hasn't been competition on that front, SUSE nails that.

[sifatullah]

I just really appreciate your time, effort, patience for making such quality videos. Your videos easily stand out among other Linux YouTubers in my eyes. Amazing review full of practical well put out information.
Much ❤️

[eskikanal]

I was litterally trying it on a VM right now! and was thinking damn wish someone I trust had a video on this your timing is frickin' perfect

[n.m]

Opensuse is so stable and good with KDE. Always with the latest tech updates but implemented professionally. Its also true their installer is convoluted and that Yast UI sucks

[negirno]

YaST is an acronym for "Yet another Setup Tool", it was a part of SUSE almost since the beginning, and it has both graphical and an ncurses command line interface.

[temari]

The installer is also not very obvious about it's capabilities. Not many people realize that when you get your software list - you can click each individual category and change what's going to be installed. You can pretty much pick stuff down to individual packages. The installer overall is very capable but definitely lacks some "easy mode". It shows what OpenSUSE is aiming for greatly - OS for sysadmins.

[CannondaleCAAD]

Been using tumbleweed as my main distro. Its so perfect for what I do.

[xperience-evolution]

You missed the most important thing in the installer:
On the summary page just before you install, you can klick on Software and choose EVERYTHING that gets installed or that you don't want to have installed. You can even choose Apparnor or Selinux or nothing. You can seriously choose everything that makes your system.

But don't worry. The other one Linux Youtuber who made a Video about openSUSE also missed that😅

[HenrikWittenberg]

One of the reasons I switched from manjaro to OpenSuse was that it also supports Secure Boot & TPM out of the box (and yes, I also use dualboot with Windows 11😁). 💪

[sazafrass]

As a long time non-enterprise user everything you said was fair and true and fair. A great video all round. For some context; the yast program isn't just graphical. That's what you used but the tui is just as functional and thus redundancies are unavoidable. I imagine the GUI is just a feature for feature transformation of the the TUI. For anyone else looking at the system: I used to use arch (BTW) but wanted a system I could afford to use while procrastinating a school project due that night and I've been hooked on tumbleweed from the first install.
Things have broken and snapper let's you hit "undo" like magic and I've no higher praise for any piece of software.
Garuda tempted me with it's pretty lights but opensuse always works. Even when it doesn't work it still works. It's incredible, honestly.