It seems like its a perfect distro. Rolling release so you get recent packages and dont have huge upgrades every few months, but not so bleeding edge that it breaks often. YaST is pretty cool but you are not forced to use it. Basic installation gives you enough essential stuff, but its not too bloated. The only thing its missing is AUR, but i still didnt find a program that i need and cant find in official repos or trough flatpak.
Honestly, now that i use it, it seems like insanity to install anything else. (for everyday desktop use)
Here are a few reasons I can think why some may not take to it. Trigger warning for Suse users
- Out-of-the-box aesthetics are pretty ugly (why are they still using that godawful default wallpaper?)
- Yast looks like the Windows 95 control panel (I guess this might be a plus for some people?)
- Zypper can be sluggish to update and install packages
- regular package updates are large, even compared to Arch
- Seems to have more frequent security/password prompts (a good thing for enterprise scenarios, but not always welcome or necessary on a personal PC)
It’s not bad by any means, but I’ve tried it out several times and always ended up abandoning it because of little niggles like the above.
you quickly feel like it’s not a distro for convenience but for enterprise productivity, yast is incredibly powerful and filled to the brim esoteric professionall options but little no no though for a casual experience, the repos don’t have much in the way of fun and are even software p*tent respecting meaning codecs and such need a separate config, the suse specific tools have their own theming , a lot of thing (like mounting luks volumes) require admin passwords… most of these can be remedied will a little tinkering but why bother when other distro are way simpler to tailor and already have a more comfortable experience out of the box
It’s a little pushy and it sometimes feels in the way.
The default for packages includes a lot more than I would enjoy. The package manager is also by default configured to install suggested packages which includes a lot of things I do not personally want. The default firefox is branded and is not the vanilla build which I don’t like. It includes a bin folder in home which I have found no other OS do. There are dozens of other small quirks that just makes it enough different from other options to make me scratch my head every now and then.
Other than all that it is well supported, rock solid, and a reasonable option for an OS. Give it a whirl and discover for yourself the bouquet of reasons you do not personally enjoy it. The good news is every OS has solid reasons NOT to use it.
I see a lot of clueless interpretations of openSUSE in this thread. Like any other distro, you have to learn how it works. Most people here don’t want to bother and keep arguing that it doesn’t work like Arch, etc. Well, it’s not Arch… duh.
Of course, by now, you’ve realized that the defaults are good and it’s very stable. Unlike other rolling distros, it rarely breaks from an update because every release is automatically tested. BUT, issues do arise with the repo NVIDIA drivers, which don’t always get built fast enough to work with newer kernels as they are released. It’s not a big deal because you only need to wait ~1 week, but surprisingly, the maintainers don’t preemptively address it. Also, codecs can be problematic because, like the NVIDIA repo, they lag behind and take time to catch up to the OSS repo. Annoying, to be sure, but if you are using flatpaks, it doesn’t matter.
And this is probably a shocker to most people here, but you don’t have to install Yast. I don’t use it at all. The catch is that you must learn something new and how to hold back certain packages.
I used it as a daily driver roughly a year or so ago. It was pretty good and actually worked really well. Personal experience was things only broke by the issue between keyboard and monitor.
If memory serves Steam ran pretty well on it and installing Nvidia was pretty easy too.
