Last month/year I decided to challenge myself and embark on the journey of using OpenSUSE to give it a fair chance to become my daily driver.
It is really hard to say if I’ve given it a fair chance, but during the journey I’ve learned OpenSUSE is not the right distribution for me.
I have tried both Leap and Tumbleweed release, and long story short, Leap is using rock-solid packages which are also quite old, while Tumbleweed is on the bleeding/cutting edge, and oh boy, did it bleed!
Due to the nature of Leap version, it is just not something I’m comfortable using daily, as I usually seek for pretty recent package versions, of, well, almost anything.
OpenSUSE folks usually proud themselves with their automated suite which tests OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and makes it extremely stable, while delivering new releases and packages each day, if not more often. And for the pace of releases, it can certainly be considered stable-ish. Unfortunately, my experience was that it has its quirks every so often after the upgrade.
After the whole experiment I still don’t know what exactly to think besides that it is not a distro for me and will likely not get onto my machine for the next year or two at least.
Some of the gripes I have had have been documented in OpenSUSE observations and initial gripes article.
So long, and thanks for all the fish, I guess?
If I had to summarize my problems with OpenSUSE in one sentence, it would go somewhat like: “It just lacks the finishing touches”.
What will I use? We’ll, I’ll continue rocking Fedora, which was perfect fit for me ever since they started Fedora.Next movement around Fedora 20 release. Contrary to the OpenSUSE, it is polish, stable, and has pretty recent package versions. Not sure how they accomplish it, but I’m quite happy :-)