openSUSE Tumbleweed w/KDE Overview | Distro Delves S2:Ep17

In this episode, we'll be taking a look at a March snapshot of openSUSE Tumbleweed.

openSUSE Tumbleweed is the rolling release version of openSUSE, the counterpart being openSUSE Leap. You could compare openSUSE Tumbleweed to Arch Linux in many ways.

openSUSE has been around for a long time - it was one of the first commercial Linux distributions on the market way back in the 1990s. openSUSE has evolved a lot since then.

Despite this being one of the longest Distro Delves episodes, there was a lot that I didn't have time to cover, especially about the history of openSUSE and Tumbleweed itself.

The desktop I used for Tumbleweed was KDE Plasma 5.18.3, which is also available on openSUSE Leap 15.

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[antonpetrov]

I used SUSE too, , but the lack of the things you said drived me crazy while I used it. BTW you deserve more views dude, you rock.

[BorgyTan]

good review as always. tumbleweed KDE is my current daily driver for almost a year now, but you are spot on about the pain of configuring network printers. i almost gave up on the OS because of this, but luckily i figured it out.

[bitsize]

Wow opensuse is really what I need I'm switching from fedora xfce thanks for your amazing review covering the main factors which I was looking for

[lazlouzurpator]

As sysadmin i use as ny daily driver opensuse tumbleweed and i love it. The kvm implementation is great. And what is most unexpected is that steam works better than orher distro

[rockdie]

both leap and tw are so F underrated.
Oh, and Yast.. is adorable but so overrated. Reminds of 90s mess, A user have to deal with Yast, discover/gnome software, it's a mess. I mean, as tw team suggests, you should never ever update via discover/package-kit. Then remove those things. It is so confused for users to deal with that. Those packages are bad even on a stable distro. On a rolling are absolutely catastrophic.
Atm there is nothing that can do about codecs, they can't even add them as a choice into the iso due to law restrictions.
All they need is a better PR and boom. bye bye ubuntu LTS, bye bye arch. tumbleweed-cli is a must have model for a rollling distro.
Anw, great review, you got one more sub :) opensuse contribution to upstream is huge, and they have a better "cooperation" with SUSE. (*cough* Redhat, do you listening?) and it's a shame to luck so much on documentation.

[honeybadger]

Suse got a new CEO. She spent 3 months traveling the world meeting corporate customers. And what did she learn? Nothing any middle manager in a corporate IT department couldn't tell you in 10 minutes. Suse is a shoddy product and I think she'll probably be the nail in the coffin.

[SavageArms]

I also had a soft spot for openSUSE, but like you, I found that there were just waaay too many papercuts and workarounds to make it worth considering as a daily driver. I thought they might finally improve with their new automated testing suite to find bugs and regressions, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to have done much. I figure they suffer from either a lack of manpower, or simply have little desire to focus on desktop usability. It's a shame too, because Zypper is like, the best package manager available on Linux IMO.

[abruenin]

Tumbleweed is my daily driver for about two years now.
The only real issues I had with it was when my root disc ran out of storage and BTFS messed up. After switching to Ext4, I never had any real issues again. This distro is rock solid.
The worst issues I had were a broken coded from time to time, but they fix such issues in a day. After the next day update, everything
worked again every time. The support for this distro is very good.
The bad reputation of Yast probably came from older versions. SuSE was one of my first distros back in the 90s with version 42. Then came a time where
Yast made more problems, than it solved. Especially when doing some stuff in Yast and other directly in the Linux config files, they had issues syncing Linux config files with their own Yast configurations.

That annoyed me so much, that I turned away from SuSE for many years. But they fixed that and these days Yast is amazing and there is
nothing like it in the Linux world.
Don't use Discover for updating anything else than Flatpaks. Use Zypper dup on Tumbleweed, they have documented this. Using anything else except zypper dup
is the best way to mess up your installation.

Flakpaks run without any issues here, but I don't use many. But for example Spotify from Flathub never made any problems here. For the VLC playback problems, there is a codec bundle. I forgot, what that
was, installed it once and since then it plays everything I need. Could be, that is was from Pacman.

But yes, the printer setup is definitely a PITA. It took me a little time, then it worked and I never had problems with that. But for
an everybodies desktop distro, this is probably the weak spot of openSuSE. On the other side, after fiddling out the installation, it runs flawless.
Overall it is amazing, how stable Tumbleweed is, especially for a rolling distro.

[PedroRosado]

Good review. I did not find that many problems while setting up the distro. Maybe because I use a few tutorials about what to do after installing it. I use Tumbleweed as my daily driver with no issues. I stick to only updating when a new snapshot is published.

[MyReviews_FOSS]

I have used it for a couple of days and couldn't bare the things that didn't work on it and how complicated it was to get them to work. Elementary OS has been very good to me for the last couple of months.

[PapasFilms]

Thank you so much... I was going to switch to openSUSE TW but I wasn't sure and I submitted it for review... Now I'm either staying on Solus or hopping to arco

[herpy]

I would love to see you review a distro called Gecko Linux. It's based on Opensuse, has both a stable and rolling releases, and addresses many of the issues about lack of codecs support that you have with the original.

[vortex.acherontic]

opensuse has very strict Firewall settings. Not even kde connect works out of the Box as well as samba if you do not allow those in the Firewall 😅

For the printer thing, since it's an HP printer, have you installed the HP printer Applet which should be available in the default repos? That's probably just preinstalled on other distros. I mean even my Canon printer with not very great Linux support at all was easy to find and setup as a networkprinter in YaST :/

Edit: But to be fair I am using openSUSE since 15+ years as a daly driver so I probably just know the Initial hurdles and how to solve them 😅. Never used any other distros beside of Ubuntu at work which on the other Hand droves me crazy xD

[nilz]

this review / overview of tumbleweed is great thanks. wonder why hide like/dislike button

[CrustyAbsconder]

My novice view, is that Tumbleweed is for Linux users who do not yet have the kohonas to live in Fedora Rawhide on hardware. All you gain ( that I can see ) from Tumbleweed over Fedora Rawhide, is the YAST and Zypper. dnf in Rawhide gets updated almost bi-monthly. I do not have any idea how to compare the latest dnf to Zypper. But dnf gets dnfdragora as a graphical option, similar to the zypper in YAST. But Rawhide suffers from the same issues, especially if you are using NVidia. One drawback to Rawhide, is Fedora discourages Fedorans from using it - unless they want to be in their development click. Whereas, OpenSUSE encourages users to use Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed seems to be about 3 months behind Rawhide on lots of components, and 6 months behind on a few specific ones. Plus Tumbleweed gets a whole lot more testing done before hand, and probably benefits from bugs found and fixed in Rawhide.


I think the rpm-crowd is better off in 2020 than it was in 2018 and before. But still there is way way too much reinventing of the wheel.


There really is not a good rpm-distro for newbies. Korora fell off a cliff about 2 years ago. I have not tried Gecko, or any of the others.


I think anybody that started off in a Debian-based distro, is never going to have any nostalgic appreciation for the rpm-based distros. There are still quite a few Linux users who started off
in Mandrake or Mandriva, or Red Hat, etc. and they remained their never getting attached to Debian and Ubuntu.


One thing about Rawhide ( which I do love and am typing this message with it ), is that you can't complain about Rawhide to Rawhidians. Rawhidians expect users of Rawhide to be able to understand how to fix things or understand how to correctly post bugs. They do not want users to use it on a production computer, whereas Tumbleweed does.

[Vykori]

OBS defaults to .flv files because that format still works when the recording is unexpectedly terminated, like an unexpected power loss. An mp4 file for comparison wouldn't specify when the video ends, which can really confuse different video players. Anyway it records with the same video codec regardless of the file format you choose, and it has a built-in "remux" tool to convert your videos to .mp4 when you're done. it's in the File menu

[esbtux]

I have been using SUSE since 6.1 and do agree that it does have many pitfalls as you described. My suggestion is use what you feel comfortable learning with. SUSE has always delivered "everything in the box" and YaST is the tool to get 95% of it working. I do have multiple other distros in VM's on my SUSE servers. Most of them work well too but still have to be tweaked. To those that remember "dependency hell" and "make config", is what we have now really that hard?

[pianokeyjoe]

I fell in Love with Linux back in 2000, especially when I discovered SuSE Linux 6.3/6.4. But it was in 2001 when I bought SuSE Linux 7.1 personal edition and I was a SuSE man all the way to 2012 when I noticed things either stopped working reliably or features just simply stopped being available. Sorting and copying thousands of picture files from one partition to another would crash the system or give disk io errors on ANY system with OpenSUSE 11/12 on it! Things like playing mp3, and mp4 and avi videos worked but I had mixed results. Later versions of OpenSUSE stopped supporting mp3 and popular video formats. Midi files no longer seem to play and frankly these are things not acceptable in an OS. So I am now a Debian fan all the way. I tried Fedora 27 for a few months after giving up on OpenSUSE with the release of LEAP/TUMBLEWEED(the numbering system seemed to have been replaced with names?), and again, multimedia was not working. Ironically, OLD versions of SuSE really had alot of nifty apps and features that kept me going back for more, but the LEAP/TUMBLEWEED versions though very stable and full of features as is the norm with SuSE, lacking the multimedia features most users expect to have in ANY electronic media device, is just a deal breaker. RIP SuSE. You were a good friend in the Linux business.

[rohitk]

I used leap back in 2017-18. Looks like nothing's changed. MX linux is my go-to distro now.

[jesse]

I have never had any issues with NVidia drivers on OpenSUSE, but this is 2 years on. Flathub Flatpacks work better now.