So I haven't done any distro hopping for a long time. I've settled on Arch Linux as my daily driver some 7-8 years ago and despite it feeling a little overwhelming at times, I quite enjoyed the challenges it provides as opportunities to learn more about how computers work. I'm in no way a professional IT guy, just interested in the subject and use my computer for pretty mundane taskst, such as office work, internet browsing, media consumption, a bit of gaming and photo editing.
I liked the way Arch lets you pick your own destiny and I can pick which software I like best on each level, from boot loader, to display manager to desktop environment. I use KDE plasma, for example, but don't like their default text-editor very much, so I don't have to install it and can just use gedit instead.
I'm happy with my main machine running Arch, but I have two other machines that I don't use very regularly, and maintaining those in Arch, even running the regular rolling release updates is impractical, so I decided to switch them to a different distro. One is an old laptop, that I use in a different room for my Online Pen&Paper Sessions, the other is an abomination of spare parts, at my parents house, (I call it Frankenstein's PC, with an old AMD Athlon CPU and 4 Gigs of RAM), that I only use on occasional visits, if I have to absolutely do something that is too annoying to do on my phone.
Would openSUSE Leap be a good pick for these use cases? What advantages does it have to offer? What do you think I will enjoy or find annoying, coming from Arch?
I'd be happy to read about your experiences, opinions and suggestions.
Here's what I personally liked moving from Arch to OpenSUSE:
People also seem to love YaST but I personally loathe it.
Now for the shit I found annoying.
The way OpenSUSE handles proprietary codecs. They're on a separate repo that sometimes gets out of sync with the regular repo so you'll try to update and it'll pester you about changing the source from which ffmpeg is installed because the official repos have a newer version. This is much milder on Leap than on Tumbleweed.
The patterns. Oh my God, the patterns. Unlike Arch, OpenSUSE aims to provide an apple-esque "just works" experience out of the box. This means that when you tell zypper to install "Plasma", you don't just get a bunch of packages from a list called "Plasma" — you get Plasma, a desktop environment. Sure, you can uninstall KMines, but it will come back next update. After all, you didn't install a compositor, a window manager, a panel and a minesweeper clone; you installed Plasma. And KMines is part of Plasma. In theory, you can uninstall the metapackage for the pattern and that'll stop its dependencies from coming back; in practice, every single package on a new install is installed through a pattern so removing them one by one will get really annoying really fast.
Finally, it's set to install recommended packages by default so you'll uninstall the metapackage for the pattern and think you finally got rid of KMines just to update your system, open your menu and find it there because some other package recommends it. You might think there's a config to disable this, and you'd be right, but then you'll update and find yourself with no WiFi because someone decided to split NetworkManager and NetworkManager-wifi into different packages and set the latter as recommended for the former.
In any case, I can think of few things worse than maintaining Arch (or pretty much any rolling release) on computers you don't use daily so give it a shot.
Disclaimer: I haven't used OpenSUSE in about 2 years so some (all?) of my information might be outdated. Apparently YaST is no more. Good. Fucking. Riddance.
Yast is great for on boarding, after you start learning CLI then CLI can be quicker. But for example YAST security module shows you if you are locked down or need to deal with some hardening; super user friendly for new comers
Yes, all of the above - but I would offer Tumbleweed recommendation due to it's rolling releases, it's just always fairly up-to-date-ish (the out-of-sync happens but imhe it's fine, eg I wait for nVidia drivers an additional week), no major releases to fiddle with yet still a neatly thought-out package (it's my daily driver but also what I put on the machines of family & friends bcs I just have no maintenance issues anymore, it's been years now).
Seems OP uses these computers very sporadically. Tumbleweed gets pretty much as many updates as Arch.
Yes, but tumbleweed doesn't care how long the span has been, its a snapshot of all the packages needed
Fair enough. I personally hate turning up my computer and being greeted with 1000+ updates even if I know the outcome won't be disastrous.
Thank you very much for that detailed and very helpful first-hand experience report.
It sounds like your annoyances might bug me too at some point. But I probably won't mind them as much on those secondary machines (and I don't hate Kmines as passionately 😉)