After a couple years on Fedora I decided to do one more Distro hop- to one I have little experience with, openSUSE.
But it seems the everything from the installer, philosophy, package manager, configs, and general way of working is just very different than every Distro I’ve tried before (Debian/*Buntu, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo)
Like what’s up with YaST? It’s like a system-wide settings/configs program plus a package manager front end unique to openSUSE?
And to update grub it seems the best command is “update-bootloader” - for example. This isn’t standard on anything else afaik. Is there anywhere other than practice I can learn all of these quirks?
openSUSE is one of the old desktop oriented distros. I find it somehow similar to the old glorious Mandrake (r.i.p.). Like it it’s a European distro and both of them are relatively KDE centric and so also somehow similar to Windows. So the philosophy behind both of them is to be user friendly in the way you can do relatively much with the central configuration panel.
Why? Because it works and is reliable. I’ve been using Opensuse now for ten years on a server and it updated through all the releases over the years without problems. The machine is getting retired now, though. But the replacement will get Leap again for sure.
Most modern distros are either new distro trying to have more modern sensibilities, distros based off of Debian, Arch, or Fedora, or occasionally original things that are okay with being superficially similar to one of those while doing things differently at lower levels. OpenSUSE is one of the few remaining distros from the olden days that has been independent and doing their own thing for decades without spawning a bunch of forks or dying off. If you want to try something even older and crazier Slackware is sure an experience.
you may not know this, but suse was originally based off of slackware way, way, waaaaay back in the day before changing over to a jurix base.
I must admit I’ve mostly been an Ubuntu user since about 2007. But switching to Tumbleweed was like a breath of fresh air. A lot of the things were different, but accumulated experience over years allowed me to feel at home. I used YaST once or twice, you don’t need it at all.
It’s just what you’re used to. To me fedora seems weird and I don’t know why people choose it over opensuse. To me opensuse feels like home.
Also yast is great and I don’t get why more distros don’t have a similar thing.
