openSUSE

I recently move to openSUSE from Ubuntu, because I simply felt a bit awkward with Canonical. Now you could say there is SUSE behind openSUSE as well, and the world is not perfect. That is true, but I really do not like the fact that Canonical would receive any of my data, as irrelevant as it might seem. I also rather happily pay for a product than unintentionally share data with a corporation. Now that said, Ubuntu is still a great OS and you can turn off telemetry and as a pragmatic computer user I have nothing against snaps.

Still there were some minor points that added to the aforementioned awkward feeling and made me switch: 1.) An annoying dysfunctional bluetooth connection to my headphones 2.) An extremely short battery life on my Thinkpad 3.) General performance felt not as good

Now coming to openSUSE. I knew the distro from years ago and thought I give it another try. And I was not disappointed. After some years of rudimentary Linux experience (mostly Ubuntu and Linux Mint) I can even appreciate openSUSE more than ever.

There are certainly a lot of soft facts that let you choose openSUSE:

• It is easy to install, still leaves you room to play around with stuff.
• It has a pretty stable KDE integration (which leads to a great DE experience)
• It has a good community behind it
• It is mostly based out of central europe (#dataprivacy)
• Rollbacks are just great and already saved my ass

I am not sure whether I would recommend it for newbies altogether, despite it being really stable, it still has the look and feel of a distro for an intermediary skillset. This is mostly because of the look and feel of the installer and YaST. Maybe it has to do with the fact that you certainly would need to use the console from time to time. But then again, at least Tumbleweed is advertised as such a distro. Hence, no one can really complain about these things.

I am using IntelliJ and Podman a lot, the experience under Ubuntu was a bit better, as it really just worked out of the box (with snaps). For openSUSE it took some tweaks so that everything works (out of Flatpaks). Might be an unfair comparison, but being productive easily is still a good measure. Using IntelliJ wo Flatpak was an annoyance, so therefore I have chosen the Flatpak path ;)

But putting in a little effort to make the IntelliJ stuff work was worth it since the overall performance is MUCH better. Of course it could be due to different DE, but it still just feels great to work on openSUSE. And indeed battery life is much, much better. I did not do any measurements, but I would say we are talking at least about 30% improvement (and yes I had TLP installed on Ubuntu).

Additionally, Bluetooth worked flawlessly (like everything else I was doing so far).

There was one little bug though with my background in the lock screen that somehow did magically change for a while.

Gaming with Steam also works easily, although you might need to change codecs for headphones in order to hear stuff. But I had a similar problem under Ubuntu.

As usual differences in distros sometimes are marginal, at least for the non-Linux nerd-faction, so for me its really the mixture of the philosophy behind, the performance, how easy I can do and understand things.

Overall, great experience with openSUSE. I can recommend. Would be great to hear responses to my experience.