this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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I don't use openSUSE. What are its strong points? As in, why would someone use openSUSE instead of another distro?
From the openSUSE wiki and DistroWatch, it seems to me that the distro's goals are the following:
Name the distro after those points. Or concepts playing with those points. "Chameleon" (as suggested by others here) seems to be a fun start.
Some Pros
Out of the box it has BTRFS snapshotting for every change you make to packages or config. So any problems or mistakes you just rollback a step at boot and if all is good you issue a command to keep that as your default boot.
Yast2 GUI GTK means you have full GUI for admin of everything. If you don't find packages in a repo you can find user package repos or binaries at software.opensuse.org and use Yast1 Click install to add them in. For somebody coming from Windows that doesn't feel confortable in the CLI this can be very helpful.
They have an openbuild service and openQA so a lot of testing is done automatically on packages, together with shared binaries with SUSE means a very stable OS that rarely has issues.
CONs
it is really an underated distro so often doesn't get the visibility it should to attract more contributors or apps thqt exist on another distro
The Yast2 GUI is something every distro needs imo. I think there were like 2 things I had to configure from the terminal on openSUSE with everything else being readily accessible from the Yast2 Management Apps. Even as someone comfortable with CLI this is a godsend of a feature.
Exactly, I know my way around zypper commands, but being able to search a few characters of a package name and then just click check boxes for install is super nice--especially with the additional clicks giving you upgrade, lock or downgrade options
It also comes with a good kde out of the box.
I’m not an expert by any means, but I mostly liked it. The included GUI tools for configuration and settings were nice, and it worked pretty well out of the box. I stopped using it because I got a little tired of having to repack the RPM package for Mullvad VPN, and I switched to something more mainstream. Sometimes I think about going back though.