openSUSE for a Month

I found my home on KDE Plasma for the desktop environment, I still haven’t found my distro. I have enjoyed uisng Ubuntu/Debian based distros over the years, Fedora has been fine, and I have enjoyed Manjaro. One distro that I haven’t spent much time with has been openSUSE. openSUSE is a key distro in my opinion because it isn’t a derivative. They do a lot of things differently and I have heard some complaints, yet I don’t feel like they are alone. Ubuntu and Fedora both have their way of doing things with preferences that differ. Same could be said for Debian or any derivatives. openSUSE does offer a rolling distro called Tumbleweed which operates a little differently relying on snapshots that execute as a distro upgrade command. The other offering is Leap which is the more tradional style distro that keeps in sync with SUSE Linux Enterpise Server. There are a lot of unique features that I want to explore like the Open Build System, OpenQA, Kiwi, and YaST. The Open Build System is pretty cool as it builds packages for any linux distro and even supports container images. Kiwi is cool because you can use it to build VM and container images. Then there is the community aspect which feels healthy and positive.

I am planning to get all of my systems converted over and use it everyday for a month at a minimum. I have already installed Tumbleweed on my desktop since I need the a 5.8+ kernel version for my hardware. Getting codecs and software that I use installed was seamless. I will probably install Leap on my laptop because it is older hardware and will work well with the kernel that ships with it. Software availability appears to be excellent and I have no concern that I can’t find what I need. I am very excited to “kick the tires” of this distro. I will be sharing items along they way and I will be doing a follow up post at the end.

Thanks for reading,

Jamie

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