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.
As a former Arch user that has been (and still is) using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for like... 9 months? I would summarize it like this: DON'T SWITCH.
At first everything will feel pretty good. Latest software like Arch, but with the BTRFS config OOTB, which feels like "wooow, this is really cool".
But then... You'll slowly start seeing the problems.
Some other comment said
zypperwas better thanpacman. That's absolutely not true.zypperis way slower, and search works horribly. Even with the new parallelization system, things are definitely worse.Also, the
paru/yayequivalent experience (non-official packages) is bad, really bad, not only because of how little software actually is there, but also because things are not as well mantained, and stuff like codecs will make you cry.And for the stability of Tumbleweed... My system, and several apps have been broken too many times in these months of usage, and stayed broken for weeks without a fix. It's not like Arch didn't break on me. But not this frequently, and not without quick fixes.
Yeah, that snapshots system is not something exclusive to OpenSUSE. Fedora does it too. And it's not like you can't configure it in 15 minutes with the Arch wiki.
I've been using Tumbleweed for almost a year now, and have had a great experience! Zypper is fine; cnf is a helpful utility that things like Debian / Fedora could certainly use (I know they have ways of searching too, but cnf is so simple).
OPI has everything I've needed for 3rd party apps, so no complaints there.
When I first installed Tumbleweed it was on an HP Elitebook, which gave me some grief with audio before I figured out a workaround, but after installing it on an X1 Carbon I can't imagine using anything else for the foreseeable future. (It's still installed on the Elitebook, I just never power it on any longer).
All this to say, your experience hasn't been great for you but for me it's been fantastic. I run Debian on the self-hosted servers I run, but on my main machine Tumbleweed has been fantastic for me. I don't even use or like YaST :D
I find your comment is a bit off-putting as well - how would you respond if I said 'NEVER USE ARCH'? My take is - tell people about your experiences, and let them decide for themselves. Why are you still using Tumbleweed if you're 'so against it'?
In my opinion, Zypper offers better dependency resolution than Pacman. I have been an Arch user, and the system is good if you do not install random scripts from AUR. It is curious how in Linux we believe that it is more secure than other systems, but then we install random scripts from AUR on a system that, in the case of Arch, is complicated to maintain the enhanced security of SELinux, for example.