
OpenSUSE Is an Amazing Underestimated Distribution - mhsabbagh
https://fosspost.org/2017/06/03/opensuse-is-an-amazing-underestimated-distribution/
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jcreedon
> Most of the lights are going toward distributions like Ubuntu, Mint,
> Manjaro.. And those shiny new distributions.

OpenSUSE I don't think really compares against any of those distros. SUSE
Linux and OpenSUSE really compare better agains RHEL/CentOS. I think the
biggest reason that SUSE lags behind most other distros has less to do with
other distros being "shiny" and more to do with strong network effects. I tend
to use CentOS or Ubuntu LTS simply because I know that googling "centos 7
<problem I'm currently having>" tends to yield a lot more high quality
resources than most other distros.

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AceJohnny2
> _" centos 7 <problem I'm currently having>" tends to yield a lot more high
> quality resources than most other distros._

And yet, most of the time the best resource I find is Arch's wiki ;)

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angry_octet
The Arch wiki is fantastic. I've not heard an explanation as to why it is so
much better than Ubuntu/Redhat. A community of tinkerers? Lack of hegemonic
domination from Redhat/Canonical?

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yellowapple
Probably because it's generic enough to be applicable to the broader Unix
ecosystem. I refer to the Arch Wiki all the time even though my Linuxen are
almost exclusively either Slackware or openSUSE.

The downside, though, is that some distros have specific tooling for solving a
problem, and that tooling is often more appropriate than the information in
the Arch Wiki (though the AW still helps if you want to understand what those
tools are doing and why).

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shrewduser
I've always had a soft spot for this distro, opensuse have been a quiet
innovator over the years. top notch distro, really deserves to be more popular
than it is.

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diakritikal
Yep! Absolutely great ethos this distro has, pretty easy (and fun) to
contribute to :)

    
    
        https://build.opensuse.org/

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brennebeck
Site not loading, just in case:
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is-an-amazing-underestimated-distribution/)

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yellowapple
The out-of-the-box support for joining an AD domain through YaST makes
openSUSE the obvious choice when I need Linux and Windows systems to play
nicely with one another. No other distro that I've tried comes anywhere close.

Hell, no other distro that I've tried offers anything really comparable with
YaST in general, AFAICT. It's why openSUSE w/ Xfce is my go-to for migrating
folks off Windows desktops (especially XP).

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Twirrim
Every time I've had to use SUSE, I've ended up getting bitten by one really
bizarre implementation choice over another.

Point in case, about 4-5 years ago I was fighting the extremely strange
mechanism they'd built in for managing firewalls, and the set of init scripts
associated with it. It was utterly bizarre, even with multiple people looking
at it, trying to wrapping their collective heads around it.

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drtillberg
Been using openSuse for years for personal device OS, highly recommend it. I
would part ways about Snapper though, by default it periodically fills the
root partition, preventing normal booting ... took a while for me to figure
that one out....

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pinewurst
I had the same problem, again after being a user for years. I ended up
eventually rebuilding the system on xfs, ditching Snapper and the vagaries of
btrfs. Not every release is solid though and you can go a few iterations
before hitting a really good one. I've been on Leap 42.1 for a long time now.

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ysleepy
I deployed NFS/LDAP/KRB5 OpenSuSE at work with autoyast. Autoyast is the only
automated installer thing that ever worked mostly as intended. Debian preseed
is just horrible. Never tried kickstart though.

The SuSE stuff is hairy and there are bugs, but they put the elbow grease into
it and it shows.

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angry_octet
SLES was great until their parent company (Novell) went bankrupt, so much
smoother than RH. Great driver support and high end system integration (HA,
big NFS). But there were always packaging difficulties because there was a
huge delay between releases. Just never had enough engineers to keep up with
other systems.

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darksoulvii
Novell isn't their parent company anymore. Hasn't been since 2006 when Novell
was bought by Attachmate. Attachmate then got bought by Microfocus which
absorbed Attachmate, NetIQ, and Novell. SUSE survived and is an independent
business unit. SLES 12 is solid.

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angry_octet
Attachmate staved them of capital. Many of the best engineers left, e.g. for
Red Hat. SLES has improved a little of late, but still far behind.

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krylon
SuSE was the first Linux distro I used, so it will always have a special place
in my heart.

Last year, I kind of went on a buying spree and got myself two new laptops (in
my defense, I'll point out I got an awesome bargain). I tried to install
Debian on them, but the installer froze on both machines.

That's when I gave Tumbleweed a try, and I was pleasantly surprised. The major
drawback is that a rolling release distro requires far more frequent reboots
than, say, Debian or CentOS. At least once a week a package gets updated that
is so central to the system (kernel, libc, systemd, ...) that a reboot is
practically required. Besides that, I have been very happy with it for the
past ~12 months.

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merb
Personally I looked at OpenSUSE after watching "Linux Sucks". Mostly I skip
distro's that use KDE as their main Desktop Environment. Besides that KDE
provides a lot, I found it extremly confusing since it's overloaded. Gnome 3
however did the exact opposite, they removed nearly everything. however the
later version tend to offer exactly what most people need (- a dock not sure
why they don't prolly because they don't want to be ubuntu/mac). But I try to
reinstall OpenSUSE in my VM with Gnome3 now, since it looks that it also has a
good support for that.

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zantana
The thing that keeps me from investigating/investing in the Suse ecosystem is
the lack of a free LTS offering.

OpenSuse is Fedora, not Centos which is what they need IMHO.

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mixedCase
They don't have first class support for Nvidia's drivers on Tumbleweed, and
Leap's cycle is too slow, so that rules it out for me at least.

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jonbarker
508 error

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simplehuman
Same here.

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