Europe is a big place. Either way, it's the most rock solid distro in my personal experience.
YaST, their system configuration tool, is the best there is. It has a GUI, TUI, and sets of commands that let you configure everything without having to guess much of anything.
I am often tinkering too much with my system, and have been burned a lot in other distros, but somehow openSUSE always has my back. Not to mention the great docs, great community and their open build system.
I run Leap, but those that want something more "up to date" can choose Tumbleweed. If you want a rolling distro but are more cautious about it, you can run Tumbleweed Slowroll.
Their NVIDIA support is great as well, as others have pointed out. It's not just the fact that you can secure boot, it also allows you to easily add an official NVIDIA repo for anything CUDA, profilling, container and video game development related (NVIDIA's texture tools).
Sure there is Ubuntu and Redhat, but the former is quite opinionated, and the latter's community version is a bit too flaky for my taste given it runs the latest and "greatest" of everything.
Relative to the rest of the world, Europe is pretty small. And even then, OpenSUSE being used more often in Europe doesn't mean it's more popular than the other big distros in Europe.
Besides all that though, my point was non europeneans runnin it outside of europe are doing so liekly because it's niche.
You've given some good points about OpenSUSE, but my point is there is nothing special about those points and OpenSUSE.
All the main distros are stable and handle whatever issues you think they might not. Dependency hells are no longer a thing, hardware not working, software not being available or being buggy etc. These are all solved issues on every main distro.
> but somehow openSUSE always has my back
This has to be nothing more than confirmation bias.
There's nothing really different about OpenSUSE over Ubuntu or Debian except preference. There is certainly no objective advantage outside of happiness that comes from a user using something they are familiar with.
> but the former is quite opinionated, and the latter's community version is a bit too flaky for my taste given it runs the latest and "greatest" of everything.
Just like openSUSE has variants so do these, and you can certainly find one that matches your preferences for stability and bleeding edge, or whatever else balance.
One issue that always burned me with Fedora is a little configuration file. Wacom tablet support is basically gimped due to it. Everytime I use it I have to fix that, and no, it's not the wayland issue but one due to poor scroll handling. It's hard to find the fix and I tried looking into it right now. Last time I tried it was on Fedora 39, it has been there since 34. Maybe not in 40 though.
I've tried plenty of distros, and sure some of it is personal preference. But still, I have often seen little issues like these be quite difficult to find solutions for. And many distros still ship insane defaults in some more niche circumstances that aren't properly tested. And many a times, those make up preferences in peoples' minds. And, arguably, they are objective reasons for doing so.
Be it due to sharing many common parts with its enterprise solution, or simply because a particular guy didn't bork my drawing tablet with some config meant to circumvent GTK scroll behaviour, or because they have a platform that you can use to build and distribute packages for theirs and other(!!!) package managers (so they have good experience automating these kinds of processes)... I don't know the reason, but I've had a better time with this distribution. I just wanted to share that it is a good one.
> One issue that always burned me with Fedora is a little configuration file. Wacom tablet support is basically gimped due to it. Everytime I use it I have to fix that, and no, it's not the wayland issue but one due to poor scroll handling. It's hard to find the fix and I tried looking into it right now. Last time I tried it was on Fedora 39, it has been there since 34. Maybe not in 40 though.
Isn't Fedora the 'testing' or bleeding edge distro/project for Red Hat? Did you on RHEL Desktop? That's the only RHAT based product that should have defaults that work with those tablets, IMO.
Don't you think it's likely there is some hardware out there where an OpenSUSE default causes an issue that doesn't happen in other distros?
> I don't know the reason, but I've had a better time with this distribution. I just wanted to share that it is a good one.
That's more than fair. I'm just so skeptical when people say $distro is so much better or more stable than all the others. Most of the time someone just had a better experience with it, rather than it being objectively better in some way. All the main distros are pretty damn stable and solved all the frustration causing issues a long, long time ago IMO.
> I'm just so skeptical when people say $distro is so much better or more stable than all the others.
openSUSE has a more sophisticated (and more expensive, computationally and financially) automated QA process (Open Build Service + OpenQA) than many distros, which is what has earned its rolling releases the stability that has garnered this reputation. It's perhaps also affected by the predominance of Arch in the rolling release space; it's easy to look stable compared to a distro that sees it as the user's routine duty to watch for and fix certain kinds of incompatibility problems with updates.
It's true that nowadays all distros are pretty good, but there are real technical differences between openSUSE and other distros which matter. The only distro with a distinct lineage that has a package manager much like openSUSE's is Fedora, and that's because dnf has copied key zypper features. dnf and zypper handle collections of multiple package sources (repository) much better than anything available in the Debian-based world does thanks to the notion of vendor change.
It's of course true that there are good technical reasons to prefer other distros, as well.
> All the main distros are pretty damn stable and solved all the frustration causing issues a long, long time ago IMO.
> openSUSE has a more sophisticated (and more expensive, computationally and financially) automated QA process (Open Build Service + OpenQA) than many distros,
Than which distros, though?
More so than Debian? Debian's seems pretty thorough. More so than Red Hat's, with the amount of important customers that depend on their distro? I'm skeptical. The rest are generally offshoots or geared towards a specific purpose or audience.
> It's true that nowadays all distros are pretty good, but there are real technical differences between openSUSE and other distros which matter.
So let's get into some details and examples! I'm interested and prepared to learn something here, hoping I might be enlightened - I haven't had a moment like that in a real long time, if that makes sense.
> The only distro with a distinct lineage that has a package manager much like openSUSE's is Fedora,
So, what makes the openSUSE package manager so much better than apk, apt or xbps?
Hoping I'm not coming off as too combative, just interested in the convo.
> More so than Debian? Debian's seems pretty thorough. More so than Red Hat's, with the amount of important customers that depend on their distro?
Yes and yes. openSUSE's automated testing builds each package not just in a chroot but a new barebones VM, to ensure that depdndency definitions are complete. I've seen Fedora devs remark about how they don't have that kind of budget to throw as, e.g., COPR builds, the implication being that they have to put more engineering into their testing infrastructure. (Sorry, it was years ago and I don't have the energy or time to source it.)
Those VMs are accompanied with screen scrapers that perform OCR in order to automatically test the pre-boot environment, before a display server comes up.
It is possible that other distros are catching up here (I know nixos-tests can include virtualized, multi-machine, networked integration tests, for some packages, for instance). But this testing infrastructure for openSUSE is quite mature. See, e.g., this presentation from nearly a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K6ZmvIOtPw
As for Debian, the greater centralization of openSUSE's package sources is perhaps worth emphasizing as a major difference here. For openSUSE, package sources are all checked into special VCS system that is part of the Open Build Service (which is capable of tracking and building external packages, including packages from other distros as well). With Debian, package sources are uploaded as binary artifacts by maintainers who can all have their own standards for style/conventions, testing, and other policies. It's not as easy to get a. God's-eye-view of Debian. This blog post provides some general insight into quirks of Debian's non-standardized processes, perhaps a few years out of date now (I don't know), but I hope it makes clear how it might be plausible for a smaller distro to have more mature centralized, automated testing: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin...
> Debian generally seems to prefer decentralized approaches over centralized ones. For example, individual packages are maintained in separate repositories (as opposed to in one repository), each repository can use any SCM (git and svn are common ones) or no SCM at all, and each repository can be hosted on a different site. Of course, what you do in such a repository also varies subtly from team to team, and even within teams.
> [...]
> When you want to make a package available in Debian, you upload GPG-signed files via anonymous FTP. There are several batch jobs (the queue daemon, unchecked, dinstall, possibly others) which run on fixed schedules (e.g. dinstall runs at 01:52 UTC, 07:52 UTC, 13:52 UTC and 19:52 UTC).
> Depending on timing, I estimated that you might wait for over 7 hours (!!) before your package is actually installable.
Debian is an amazing project and it's no happenstance that it has served as the base for many successful distros as well as thrived in its own right for many years. But there's some social and technical cruft there that leaves room for some competition, isn't there?
(It looks like nowadays Debian has actually adopted SUSE's openQA as part of its automated testing stack: https://openqa.debian.net/)
I have a fuzzier picture of how OBS/openQA compares to Red Hat and Fedora's package building and testing tools! You've reminded me that I'd like to learn more about that. But do dig into OBS to get a sense of how SUSE is built. It may even be useful to you: their build cluster offers lots of free compute and it'll let you build and host repos for free— even of other distros like Debian and Red Hat.
None of the tooling questions are the real stuff, though— the real stuff is the predictability and freshness of openSUSE Tumbleweed, which users of other rolling release distros tend to speak favorably about once they've tried it.
Tumbleweed is substantially more up-to-date than Fedora Rawhide, but is also markedly more stable and more committed to stability— the expectation is generally that Tumbleweed should be highly usable by and reliable for non-experts, but the expectation for Rawhide is that it exists primarily for Fedora developers and any breakage is on you.
I'd be happy to compare zypper (and dnf) to apt and all (I admit I've not used Void Linux). I've gotta go for now!
> openSUSE's automated testing builds each package not just in a chroot but a new barebones VM, to ensure that depdndency definitions are complete.
How are you sure other distros don't do that? I'm also not convinced that building in a vm instead of a chroot is any kind of advantage.
> Sorry, it was years ago
So isn't it possible they've changed things now?
> Those VMs are accompanied with screen scrapers that perform OCR in order to automatically test the pre-boot environment, before a display server comes up.
So to me, all that sounds is nifty, but not especially impressive. Any devops team could write something to do the same in a couple of hours. If other distros don't have that, it could simply be because they don't need it.
> It is possible that other distros are catching up here
This is the crux of your position, though, that all these other distros are that much more behind openSUSE. You start your reply with "yes and yes", very confident, but now here in the meat of the discussion you say you don't actually know.
I'm not trying to be combative or adversarial here, but it really seems like a lot of assumptions are being made.
> With Debian, package sources are uploaded as binary artifacts by maintainers who can all have their own standards for style/conventions, testing, and other policies.
I mean, Debian as a system has a standard for its packages, standardizing what they felt they needed to, and all packages adhere to that and the system has been working well, possibly longer than suse has even existed.
> but I hope it makes clear how it might be plausible for a smaller distro to have more mature centralized, automated testing
Well, I never doubted that was possible. I'm just skeptical OpenSuse's testing setup is/has leading/led to a system that is more stable or whatever other supposed advantages it has over say Debian and Red Hat.
> But there's some social and technical cruft there that leaves room for some competition, isn't there?
Is that cruft not just project preferences, of which each distro has it's own version?
> But do dig into OBS to get a sense of how SUSE is built. It may even be useful to you
My days of installing a distro for fun have been over for a long, long time. Now I only really like Alpine, Devuan if I need something chunkier. I appreciate the suggestions and conversation though, thanks!
> So to me, all that sounds is nifty, but not especially impressive. Any devops team could write something to do the same in a couple of hours. If other distros don't have that, it could simply be because they don't need it.
This isn't a complete description of openQA, but an illustrative snapshot. Btw, it looks like Fedora has adopted this tool as well (several years ago, hehe): https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/
And yet there is no one anywhere who claims that Fedora Rawhide is more stable than openSUSE Tumbleweed. This is in part because of a real difference of purpose and outlook; Tumbleweed is somewhat exceptional as a rolling release which explicitly emphasizes stability through automated testing as a value and goal.
> > It is possible that other distros are catching up here
> This is the crux of your position, though, that all these other distros are that much more behind openSUSE. You start your reply with "yes and yes", very confident, but now here in the meat of the discussion you say you don't actually know.
> I'm not trying to be combative or adversarial here, but it really seems like a lot of assumptions are being made.
Sure. I'm not an active contributor to openSUSE or Debian or RHEL, and I'm not currently working on a study of their production pipelines. I'm just trying to give you a clearer picture of some differentiators that I've picked up as a Linux user, developer, and ops professional with the incidental experience I've had with those distros in the past ~20 years.
But I think some of these 'assumptions' are pretty fair, e.g., the distro that created and chiefly maintains openQA has a more mature automated testing infrastructure than a distro that only adopted it a few years ago.
> My days of installing a distro for fun have been over for a long, long time. Now I only really like Alpine, Devuan if I need something chunkier. I appreciate the suggestions and conversation though, thanks!
You don't need to install (or use) openSUSE to play with OBS. Just make a free account on build.opensuse.org and start building packages for any DEB-based, RPM-based, or PKGBUILD-based distro (as well as container images incl. for Docker, AppImage, Snap, and Flatpak). No Alpine/apk support yet, sadly. Idk whether Devuan is supported as a base distro or not, but there are some repositories intended for use with Devuan hosted on build.opensuse.org, e.g.: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:bgstack15
> Well, I never doubted that was possible. I'm just skeptical OpenSuse's testing setup is/has leading/led to a system that is more stable or whatever other supposed advantages it has over say Debian and Red Hat.
The only way you can really compare the stability of two distros is by actually running them. What I can offer you short of that experiential knowledge is that openSUSE has a sophisticated, mature testing infrastructure of which major components have been adopted by the other distros you cite as examples.
You will be hard pressed to find someone who can compare the testing infrastructure of even just two distros in great detail and totally current. This guy probably can, he's a major NixOS/nixpkgs contributor, a Fedora developer, and an Alpine contributor: https://github.com/fabaff . I can't personally think of anyone else, but I'm sure there are some.
I can tell you that still fairly recently, one Debian developer gave a talk about the Open Build Service with the subtitle 'fix the mess': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh0FoS_J_Gs
> Is that cruft not just project preferences, of which each distro has it's own version?
Yes? But preferences can be literally anything with widely varying impacts on social and technical processes... so to say 'everyone has them' doesn't really say anything at all.
Anyway, about the actual package managers I can be much more concrete because I've used them all much more recently.
> So, what makes the openSUSE package manager so much better than apk, apt or xbps?
Like I said, I won't speak to xbps because I've not used it. Additionally, this comes with the caveat that you may prefer package managers that make different tradeoffs than zypper and dnf do. But here are the things that openSUSE's package manager (and nowadays also Fedora's) get really right imo that apk and apt are lagging on.
This means that resolving dependencies in a way that is guaranteed to be both correct and complete requires is hard (indeed, it's NP-hard). Dependency managers that take this seriously employ SAT solvers, openSUSE's now lives in this library: https://github.com/openSUSE/libsolv. apt lagged behind zypper in this area for many, many years, and just finally got a SAT solver for dependency resolution a couple months ago: https://blog.jak-linux.org/2024/05/14/solver3/ . Apk doesn't have a backtracking dependency solver and thus will sometimes fail to identify possible solutions to dependency resolution problems, even when they exist. But for that, it gets to be fast. I believe pacman and xbps also make that same tradeoff (completeness for speed).
Apt has similarly lagged in establishing a modern command-line interface. Zypper provided a modern, unified subcommand interface for managing all packages and repositories when it came out nearly two decades ago, whereas apt has only offered a modern subcommand interface for less than a year ( https://9to5linux.com/ubuntu-24-10-and-debian-13-trixie-to-f... ), and last I used it (within a year or two) it also still lacked facilities for key management (apt-key was deprecated but there is no integrated replacement). APT is making some very nice advances, but they're still playing catch-up.
The single thing I miss the most with APT, though, is entirely missing, and it's the notion of 'vendor'. openSUSE's package manager introduced me to the concept of 'vendor stickiness' (https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Vendor_change_update), which allows you to upgrade without changing who is providing what package for you in a natural way. (This idea has also since been adopted by Fedora in their `dnf` package manager, as well.) Zypper's facilities for creating a hierarchy of repositories, prioritizing them, and marking some equivalent to others with respect to 'vendor', are just way more flexible and powerful than anything available in APT.
> I mean, Debian as a system has a standard for its packages, standardizing what they felt they needed to, and all packages adhere to that and the system has been working well
From a packager's perspective, the tooling situation for openSUSE is also way more uniform than for Debian or downstream distros, which can make it easier to get your head around. Even a small amount of packaging experience for Debian is enough to reveal a marked enough difference here to justify a preference for some other distro.
> possibly longer than suse has even existed.
Debian is something like 6 months older than SUSE. SUSE, like Debian, is one of the oldest surviving Linux distributions.
By 'niche distro' do you just mean 'not Ubuntu or RHEL'? openSUSE is neither unconventional nor obscure.