I have heard that for a long time, but lately since the Red Hat and RHEL thing happened I have heard it more.
I’ve never given OpenSuse a try, not really because I don’t like it or anything just because I’ve been fine with my current distro, but I’ve been thinking about it and I’ll possibly install it in a VM and if I like it I’ll install it on my personal machine.
The only thing that really concerns me are the Nvidia proprietary drivers, they are installed during the installation when it detects my hardware or I have to install them manually?
Edit: After a while playing with the VM I decided to install it on my PC and my goodness, it’s great! Among the things to highlight, I find it incredible that they have things like Yuzu or RPCS3 in their available repositories, in my previous distro I had to use flatpak for that or appimages and many times those programs did not recognize my GPU (possibly because I used Wayland). I also love that it has apparmor installed by default and even that I can access snapshots from grub!
Plasma is just well optimized in openSUSE with sensible defaults like animation speeds etc. and it’s really up to date. At least on Tumbleweed which I recommend over Leap anyway.
As for nVidia I can’t speak for myself as I have AMD card.
I’ve run Tumbleweed in several VM’s, and it’s great, but I wonder how bad the upkeep is of a rolling release distribution. Do you update every day? Every week? I’d get OCD, probably. How about any danger of mucking up your system versus a more stable release distro?
I update it every now and then, basically when I feel like it. Sometimes it’s day or two apart, sometimes it’s after month or even more. For rolling distro I’d say it’s incredibly stable. And even if something breaks (and with my lack of proper skills it happens) there’s easy fix with automatic snapper snapshots. It never really broke on me and I’m running it for two and half years (being my first linux as main OS). I really can’t recommend it enough.
Thanks, I’ll try it on a laptop. I knew my way around Linux pretty well a long time ago, but when you mess up your package manager, I’m not sure if I’ll always find my way out again, haha. Not ideal for a desktop or gaming machine. Also, I sometimes like automatic updates. Not sure if that’s a great idea on a rolling release.
I see people say they turn off notifications about updates and just do it once a week, but man, if I open Discover and see 30 updates sitting there I cannot ignore it. I get real twitchy about it. So my update routine is daily. Every morning with my fresh cup of coffee I run “zypper dup”. If all goes well, I start my day. If all does not go well, I rollback to the previous state with snapper, and then start my day. Using snapper takes about 30 seconds, and frankly nvidia is the only reason I can remember ever having to use rollback.
Tumbleweed is really painless to maintain, even if you update every day. You don’t have to update every day, but my particularly specialized Update OCD doesn’t allow me to wait a week, it seems.
I’ve been scripting pre update snapshot, update, restart, post update snapshot. Whenever I start my PC and there’s a update notification, I just run my script, have a look at Lemmy or get a coffee or have a piss, and then go on with whatever I was going to do. Or skip update for a day if I don’t wanna invest the time.
The only reason for a rollback was a fuck up on my side. Nvidia drivers from the official zypper repo is always up to date and has not failed me for as long as I had a Nvidia GPU
It’s really easy and comfortable to use.
The “issue” of rolling releases is what you need to update ALL packages at once
only updating a part of them or installing a new one without updating anything else might lead to some issues like mismatching dynamic library versions (=the software won’t start)
I run Gentoo, but do a daily update when I think of it. Usually never takes more than a minute or two. If it’s a kernel update I just reboot when I’m finished.