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.
All it does is share the package cache across all the systems.
Any time any Arch system goes to install a package, it checks if that package is already in the cache before downloading a new one.
At home, I've got several Arch systems across bare metal and virtual machines, and they all share a cache.
The first one to update the kernel takes a couple minutes to download the package. The second through ninth systems take zero seconds to download that package.
As for different needs, you're right in that the overlap isn't going to be perfect, systems with unique purposes will need to download each non-overlapping package. But the overlap is substantial. The kernel, the base system, ssh, python, all the standard utilities, there's no reason to redownload all of that.
Since yours are in different households, though, there will be even less benefit there.
Instead, I'd recommend Ansible's community.general.pacman (or some combination)
Thanks for the elaboration. I think I get it now, but yeah, the benefits would be limited.
Gotta take a look at Ansible. I've never used it before.
Ansible's essentially just python scripts and ssh, and you define actions in a yaml file, and then say "run these actions on all of these hosts" with options for running them one after the other.
A huge part of the utility is that many things have been abstracted, so you can have an "update, reboot, and then confirm" playbook and run it across Windows, RedHat, AIX, Debian, Arch, UNIX, PiOS, etc, systems, and expect it to work (along with handy features like a retry file, logging, fact caching, conditional instructions based on states, and lots more).
After thinking about your case some more, I don't think this would add too much more than some ssh commands in a bash script triggered by a cron job.
But it would be fun!