First, let me be clear up front that I’m not promoting the idea that there should be one “universal” Linux distro. With all the various distros out there for consumers, there’s lots of discussion about Arch, Debian, and Fedora (and their various descendant projects), but I rarely see much talk about openSUSE.
Why might somebody choose that one over the others? What features or vision distinguishes it from the others?
Edit: I love all the answers! Great stuff. Thanks to everyone!
Tumbleweed is rock solid. I took out an old Intel based Macbook that has not been updated in two years (I stopped traveling for work and no longer needed a laptop so the software got outdated). OpenSuse Tumbleweed updated flawlessly. It switched to the newest gcc, switched over to pipewire, etc. without a single issue. I did not read the latest news as I used to do on Arch.
Also, OpenSuse is a family of distros. Choose what works for you. Tumbleweed is the main product and the base of all Suse offerings (and I recommend it).
- Tumbleweed rolls similarly to Arch but has more QA testing
- Slowroll is just snapshots of Tumbleweed that are updated less frequently. May replace Leap.
- Leap does traditional releases similar to other OSes such as Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu
- MicroOS (and its flavors) update the same way Android does; as a full image. You could pick a MicroOS flavor such as Aeon (Gnome) or Kalpa (KDE) and stick to Flatpaks which as a strategy works great on the Steamdeck but I have yet to try it on desktop.
As someone who has tried several Linux distributions what was important to me was how stable updates were. On that old Macbook, that I used for ten years; I mostly used Chakra, Arch, and Tumbleweed. That Tumbleweed install was at least six years old.
I did have one issue, but it was a kernel introduced bug. Long since fixed. Someone messed up Apple EFI boot; so I had to load the EFI menu when booting and then select my internal SSD to start the OS.
MicroOS (and its flavors) update the same way Android does; as a full image
They don’t. They update with regular packages. The updates are atomic though and are only applied at next boot, so there’s less of a risk of weird breakages.
I’ve been using oS:TW for over a year now. It’s extremely stable for a rolling release distro. Plus if something does break, snapper rollbacks from the grub menu are set up by default. I’ve only had rollback once though due to a fucky Nvidia update.
Fucky Nvidia updates are the exact sort of thing I’m aiming to mitigate with my next OS choice. I use Bazzite on a spare laptop, and I’ve had to do rollbacks on that before; it’s extremely handy to have that capability out of the box!
I have the same result in my current survey. Nobody openly talks about OpenSUSE a lot.
That doesnt mean they dont have many users, but they are not really active in general online forums.
There was also not a lot of people moving from it to something else.
OpenSUSE to SEL is similar to Fedora to RHEL. I dont know why Fedora gets more focus.
This is often random, and I think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed may be better than traditional Fedora, as they use BTRFS snapshots automatically.
Meanwhile, Fedora Atomic Desktops are WORLDS better than their Kalpa and Aeon, and you can also see that by their forks /variants.
OpenSUSE has Aeon and the barely maintained Kalpa, Fedora has tons of variants and way more inofficial ones. Especially uBlue made cool user accessible tooling and they are good at shipping tailored distros like Bazzite or Bluefin/Aurora.
There are a bunch of software-related reasons why openSUSE is a good choice (snapper, zypper, yast, to name a few), although few are exclusive to openSUSE. I think the primary selling point of openSUSE (Tumbleweed) is that it is a rolling release distro that never crashes, never requires attention, and just works. One of the reasons people don’t talk about it is probably that it is boring. All packages are tested extensively. It never breaks. And even if it did break, the default btrfs file system and snapper ensure that the system doesn’t stay broken for longer than it takes to reboot.
If you want a distro that is up to date, easy to use, and dependable, openSUSE is a fantastic choice. It’s just not very exciting to have something that never requires attention; a lot of people use Linux because they like things requiring attention.
As an afterthought, I also think the fact that openSUSE and its users seem to be pathologically unable to create any logo or symbol for anything even tangentially related to the distribution that doesn’t look like absolute shit might be holding them back.
and broken btrfs systems don’t stay broken for longer than it takes to reboot
Not true. Fedora and others use BTRFS too and just dont deal with snapshots at all.
I dont care about traditional Fedora but that is pretty bad. TW is way better here.
I still find it quite baffling that for a distro that pitches itself as an everyday Linux distro for newer and intermediate users, Fedora doesn’t come with snapshots preconfigured out of the box or any obvious way of handling a system restore.
Yes traditional Fedora is useless in that regard. Their offline updates also dont really work reliably.
Rpm-ostree (“Fedora Atomic Desktops”) Fedora meanwhile is really really nice.
As an afterthought, I also think the fact that openSUSE and its users seem to be pathologically unable to create any logo or symbol for anything even tangentially related to the distribution that doesn’t look like absolute shit might be holding them back.
As shallow as it might seem, good branding is really important, since it has the power to instantly convey vision or commitment to a project.
But to your point about low-maintenance distros, I wonder how the immutable landscape will look in the next five years!
Opensuse tumbleweed is probably the most stable rolling release, so you get the newest software without everything breaking. Also Yast is an amazing utility that allows you to administer your system entirely with a GUI
