OpenSUSE is my friend now

- 2 mins read

My introduction to Linux

It was a Dell Mini 9 running Ubuntu (8? Maybe 10?). It was an excellent start, and to this day, I stand by Ubuntu’s utility as a gentle introduction for people already used to navigating desktop environments. The next few years were uneventful explorations of Puppy Linux, #!, Kali, and Linux on chromebooks. As time went on, work admin, gaming and the nearby temptation of WSL turned me into an almost exclusive Windows 10 user.

But quite recently, when I received a new laptop and was staring bleakly at expanse of Windows 11, I was ready to go for another Linux distro as a daily driver. My first port of call ended up being EndeavourOS: Arch-Based, with an out-of-the-box desktop experience, and I was ready to explore and learn the way I had with Ubuntu.

It didn’t work out for me and it’s not Arch’s fault.

This was my first experience with how truly personal distro choices are; of all my experiences since Ubuntu, this was the first computer that I needed to find a distro that was right for me rather than for a project, and furthermore, the first since I had started consciously abandoning popular cloud services. This experience alone I would find a decent justification for the sheer number of distributions that exist, if not for the further wrinkle of learning how to grok which one is best for you.

I was really amazed by how much friendlier i found OpenSUSE Leap than EndeavourOS.

I’m sure it is as easily explained as learning styles, but I still found it striking.

On the surface, the two could be called similar:

  • KDE Plasma DE

  • Konsole as terminal of choice

  • Competent auto-install and auto-update on both setups

However, my preferences made themselves known immediately:

  • Zypper and YaST were much more memorizable and intuitive than pacman or YaY

  • I found tweaks related to system setup, rather than package selection much more robustly discussed in forums

  • OpenSUSE’s installers allowed me to be much more intentionally open ended with my install.

I’ll be back, Arch.

I do intend to go back to Arch; possibly even EndeavourOS. As I improve on other skills, I look forward to trying out alternative window managers and other workflow efficiencies. But for now, I am happy to get comfortable, confident and competent with OpenSUSE.