 So, I have been using OpenSUSA now for a little bit over two months, and while I can't believe that two months of my two-year Linux challenge has already gone by, I do want to take a moment to pause and talk a little bit about my experiences with OpenSUSA so far, because I think that it's going to be important as I go along through this experience of using a Linux distribution long-term to document my progress, because I know that a lot of people out there are thinking using a distro for two years isn't all that much of a challenge. These are the people who have been using Ubuntu since 2008. These are the people who have been using Debian since the 90s. They don't really get the whole distro hopper's mindset, but a lot of my audience are people who are like me. They like to switch between distros, and I think that for them, and definitely for me, using a distribution long-term and actually dedicating yourself to it is a challenge. So what I want to do today is talk about my first two months of the two-year Linux challenge, and I want to talk specifically about OpenSUSA, because I truly honestly believe that OpenSUSA is the most underrated Linux distribution out there. It is a fantastic distribution, and I want to talk about it. So that's what we're going to do today. Before I jump in, if you'd leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it. Also, when I do the thumbs up thing, for whatever reason, the camera just completely changes focus. Whatever. Leave a thumbs up, and it would really help the channel, so thank you very much for that. Wow. Okay. I don't understand that, because autofocus is definitely turned off. Anyways, so OpenSUSA, I want to talk about first my general experience with it, and then I'll go into a little bit more of a general sense of why I think people don't use it as much as I think that they probably should. So for the last two months, OpenSUSA has been spectacularly stable. I mean, I'm talking like one of the best experiences with Linux I've ever had stable. And I know that sounds like hyperbole, or that I'm overselling it a little bit, but it really has been a fantastic experience. I've experienced a few hiccups, mostly surrounding the fact that I don't know what I'm doing half the time, so I blame most of those things on me. But just from a pure usage standpoint, OpenSUSA has been very, very stable, and I've honestly been very surprised by it, because there have been some monumental updates to the system over the course of the last two months. In fact, about a week ago, maybe two weeks ago or so, I don't remember if it was before the power outage or after. I had an update that had over 3,000 package updates on it. Now I update my system every four days, so it's not like I've waited a whole month to do an update. So somewhere between one day and the next four days, 2,800 packages needed to be updated. It was a GCC update. I'm pretty sure the entire Python stack had to be updated as well, so there's a ton of packages. And when I see that number, or when I have seen numbers like that in the past, usually on Arch, where updating is a big deal, I always get quite scared, because when you have a lot of updates, the more updates you have, the more likely something is to go wrong, right? And especially on a rolling release distro like OpenSUSA, I've expected more things to go wrong with these gigantic updates that continue to happen. Now I haven't had any near as big as that one, but I've had several. It's not uncommon actually for me to see three or 400 packages every four days for me to update. And that's not the similar to Arch. That's usually the way rolling releases work. So it's not a flaw. What I'm saying is that I would expect with that amount of updating that goes on for things have broken somewhere along the line, but I have experienced none of that. Like it just reboots and comes back and while I expect things to go wrong, it just carries on and it's been amazing. Now that I've talked about it, I fully expect tomorrow to do an update and have my computer not boot just because I jinxed it. But that's probably been my biggest surprise is that it has been phenomenally stable. And the thing is, is that, like I said, I expect rolling releases to break from time to time. I expect packages to break sometimes for to not boot whatever. But the longer that I use OpenSUSA, the more comfortable I am with the knowledge that it's probably not going to break. Now, granted, it's only been two months. So, you know, have a long ways to go over the two years of this challenge. But I think that I'm confident in saying that this is the most stable rolling release that I've ever used. Now, I used Arch for years. I used Fedora, which is a quasi rolling release. I suppose you could say it's not really. But, you know, whatever, you know, it definitely uses more up to date packages and say Debian. So there's that, like I've used many different Arch based distributions. All of them are rolling release. So I've used rolling releases in the past almost always. I've experienced some issues somewhere within the first couple of months. And with OpenSUSA, I can't say that it has been spectacularly stable. So just to get that part out of the way, another thing that I was really worried about when it came to OpenSUSA was package availability, because package availability on a distribution that I wasn't familiar with was kind of worrisome for me. Was it going to have the really weird packages that I tend to need? Things like Rofi scripts that I usually use, things like the terminal fonts and the icons and all the stuff that I really, really want to have on my system that aren't in traditional repositories. Debian oftentimes doesn't have them. Ubuntu doesn't have them. You get the idea, right? OpenSUSA, I haven't had any problems. Now, obviously, there have been some situations where I haven't been able to find the package that I needed. But in those situations, I've either been able to go to the OpenBuild service, which is basically copper. It's not exactly the same. So don't at me. Don't tell me the differences. I understand that there are differences. But in terms of front end usage for users, you're adding a repository and then you can install the package. It's similar to copper, kind of like a PPA only. It's hosted by OpenSUSA, right? So if I haven't been able to find it in the regular repositories, I can go to the OpenBuild service a lot of times that it's there. A few times I've had to build things from source, but it's no different than a lot of times having to do the same thing on Arch or on Debian or Ubuntu or whatever. So package availability has been very, very good and much better than I thought it was going to be. The OpenSUSA repositories are quite large and the experience of downloading the major stuff that you're going to need, all of it's there. And what I found better on OpenSUSA than I ever did on Fedora is that the packages on OpenSUSA, specifically the ones that are targeted towards Tumbleweed, are kept up to date much better than the stuff that is kept in the Fedora repository. So if you've ever used Fedora, you know that they have a lot of stuff in their repositories, but a lot of stuff gets abandoned over time, especially once you've started adding in things like from RPM Fusion and stuff. The repositories aren't well maintained and they're not well pruned. So a lot of times, like with Arch even, the AUR, while it does have a lot of really old packages, it does a good job of telling you when you're downloading an old package with Fedora, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. And a lot of, you see a lot of really old packages in the Fedora repositories that just don't get updated. And this is like major packages, right? And specifically I'm thinking of i3, the i3 package, at least when I was using it, and I remember I haven't used it in over a year, was really old at that point. And i3 had seen some major updates and those didn't come to Fedora for quite some time, even though Fedora is much further along on the newer package support than Debian is, right? So when it came to OpenSUSA, I was expecting it to be kind of like Fedora when it comes to the packages that are available in the repository, not necessarily in breadth but in the maintenance of it, right? But I haven't seen that at all. The repositories, while maybe they're not as updated as fast as Arch, which I appreciate because they do a lot of testing, you do get the most recent version within a couple of weeks, sometimes within two or three days, depending on what the package actually is. And I really appreciate the testing and the support that they've managed to put into the repositories for OpenSUSA. It's just done a really fantastic job and it's been a very, very good experience. And the few exceptions to all of that is a lot of times with proprietary software because I still do use some proprietary software, I know Buhis and all that stuff, right? Specifically, I'm talking about, in this case, Vivaldi. Vivaldi is a proprietary piece of software. It's not available in the OpenBuild service or in the OpenSUSA repositories. You can get an RPM package on the Vivaldi website which you can install, but it's been a piece of garbage every time that I've used it, every time it updates, it breaks, I don't know what's actually going on with that package, but what I did there and I've done a few times since, every time I can't truly find the version of the piece of software that I want, what I've been able to do is use Distrabox in order to get that piece of software. I just download it in ArchBase Distrabox, I export it using Distrabox Export and then I can just use Vivaldi or whatever on OpenSUSA but it's actually running on Arch. So I have some cheats, I'll freely admit that. But overall, it has been a fantastic experience in adding in the Distrabox experience where I can just kind of get to the things that I absolutely have to have that OpenSUSA can't provide has been a very, very good experience. And I honestly can't tell you how happy I am with the way things have been going in terms of stability and package management and package availability and all that stuff. Honestly, I can say I haven't had this good of experience on Linux, probably ever. My Fedora experience there for six months last year was really good, OpenSUSA has surpassed that in terms of how good this has been. Now, let me talk about a few negative things. I should talk, it's not all sunshine and rainbows, so we're definitely going to talk about some negative things. So first thing first, and probably the biggest problem that I have with OpenSUSA is the same problem I had when I reviewed it two years ago and that is that Zipper is the slowest package manager, period. Like it's not even really all that close, to be honest with you. And there are multiple reasons for that. So first off, a lot of people compare the slowness of it to DNF and that's a reasonable comparison because DNF is also a very slow package manager. The problem is that Zipper takes it further. So DNF and OpenSUSA both have the same problem initially in that their mirrors are slow. Now, even if you do some jiggering and getting yourself to using a closer mirror and all this stuff, which you can do on both distributions, you find that even then refreshing mirrors is very slow. Where DNF has an advantage is that it supports parallel downloads. So when you go to update or download or install whatever, you can set parallel downloads to true on DNF or on Fedora in this case. And that means that you can download five or 10 different packages all at the same time and it just speeds things up phenomenally. So it makes it seem like as you're installing stuff that DNF gets past the slowness of the mirrors and just kind of speeds up. Zipper on the other hand does not support parallel downloads and they have been working on parallel downloads since 2016. It is now 2023, you can do the math there. It's been quite a while. They've been working on it. I don't know if they're still working on it or if they've just given up. I don't know. I hope they're still working on it. I hope that we see it sometime within the next two years while I'm still using OpenSUSA, but I'm not holding my breath. If they've been working on it that long, it's not that much of a priority for them apparently. Or there's just a few people working on it. I don't know what the actual situation is there, but they've been working on it for a very long time. It still doesn't support parallel downloads. And that is a big problem because if you're going to send out a whole bunch of updates like that 23 or 2800 update that I saw earlier or a couple of weeks ago or whatever, if you're gonna send out updates like that, you have to have a package manager that can actually keep up and make that seem like it's a reasonable thing to do, right? That particular update, no, I don't know the exact time, but it took approximately two and a half hours to download and update or install, right? It took a long time. That is a long time to install updates on a system like mine. I don't wanna, I'm very fortunate. I have very fast internet. I have a very powerful computer. It's fairly modern. You know, it shouldn't take two and a half hours to update my system. It just shouldn't, no matter how many updates there are. On Arch, never had, oops. On Arch, I never had that problem. On Fedora never had that problem. On Debian, which also has mechanisms for parallel downloads, never had that problem. Debian and Ubuntu both do a really good job of providing a ton of mirrors, whereas OpenSusa just doesn't. Now they have a lot of mirrors, but none of them are particularly close to me. And also, I found the mechanism for changing the mirrors to be very tedious. It wasn't very easy to do. If you use Yast, apparently you can do it easier. I don't use Yast, so I'll talk about that here in a few minutes. So if you're using the command line like I am, it's not necessarily the easiest thing to do. It's not like switching sources or mirrors on Debian where you just go edit a file, or you do the same thing on Arch, actually. You go to one of the Pacman files and it's just you changing the mirrors. And even then, once I did get them changed, it didn't really improve the speeds of Zipper. So my biggest complaint, and one of the reasons where I've spent the last five minutes talking about it, is that Zipper is slow. Now I said all of that, and it was my biggest complaint, but honestly it hasn't been that big of a deal to be honest with you. I come across it, I see that it is slow every time I do an update every four days. I also see it every time I install something, but as I've moved on into the challenge, I've been installing stuff less, so I see it less often and it becomes less of a problem. So that initial experience that I had at the beginning always having to update, always having to install new stuff like constantly over the course of the days, I saw a lot more then than I do now because I'm not installing as much stuff. Most of the stuff that I need is already here. So that's by far my biggest problem. My other issue is really kind of nitpicky and that is that the support on OpenSUSA is not the greatest. Now some of it is just that the community isn't that large, right? It's not the most popular Linux distribution out there, so the community is necessarily small. It's kind of like using a niche arch-based distro or a niche fedora-based dist or something like that. You know, there are people using it, but there's not that many, right? And while OpenSUSA is probably more expansive than some of those niche distros, it still does feel like a very small community. And because it's a very small community, they're tightening it, you know? You can tell when you go under the forums of OpenSUSA that not only are there not a lot of people there because you can basically see all of the new topics in the English category, you know, within a few minutes. Like sometimes I'll go over there and there'll be like 10 or so new red messages over the course of the day. You know, there's not a lot of activity on the forums. Now they may have other sources of support. They may have a Discord or they may have an IRC or whatever, I don't know. I don't deal with any of the other channels for that kind of stuff. I just focus on the forums. You can tell the people on the forums that are very, they all know each other and they have a specific, like most forums, they have a particular way of doing things. And they also, like a lot of forum users, tend to not be as welcoming towards noobs, to be honest with you. Now, it doesn't go as far as the arch forums. Don't get me wrong there. But you can see some particular disdain for new users who are asking new user questions. You can tell. Now, for the most part, I got past that pretty easily. I'm pretty well adept at being able to look up stuff on my own and then when I can't find the stuff, I can say, hey, I did these steps and I took the, these are the steps that I've taken. These are the things that I've Googled. Can you help me? And usually when you say you've made some attempt at fixing it yourself, then you get a better response than just saying, hey, what does CD do? I mean, if you're asking that much of a new question and you never bothered to go look, you get a better response if you at least tried, right? So it hasn't been that big of a deal for me, but I've seen other responses to other new people that hasn't been as friendly as you'd want. And some of the administrators there are, they can be a little bit, I'm not going to say that they're mean. I'm more going to say that they are, what's the word that I'm looking for? They're very abrupt. They're abrupt, right? They're blunt is another word that I could use there. They're just, you can tell that they are not as patient with some questions as others. So let's just put it that way. Also, I think that actually the biggest, the bigger problem there isn't the attitude of the people in the forums. It's more that the forums are small. So you're not going to have a lot of people, they're rushing to help you when you have a question. Now, I haven't had a problem getting answers. You can see threads of 100 responses or whatever on the forums very easily. People are on there, they're participating, so it's good. But if you've ever gone to the Ubuntu forums or the Ubuntu discourse in this case, or you've gone to the Arch forums where you've asked a question and all of a sudden you have like, 10 people replying to that like within an hour, you're not going to have that in open Susan because it's just not as big of a community. That's just kind of the bottom line. And honestly, that's a bigger problem than the attitude of the people there. And when I say problem, it's not really something that they can fix because you can't just say, hey, more people, please use open SUSE, so we have more support people. You can't really do that. So it's just kind of the nature of the way open SUSE is. It's just not a very big distribution and therefore the community is not very big. Those are the two negatives that I really had to say about open SUSE. Everything else has been fantastic. I know I've been going on now for over 20 minutes before editing about how awesome open SUSE is. And I want to transition into the second part of the video finally, and that is to talk about why I think open SUSE is very underrated and why people just kind of don't give it as much credit as they need to. So first off, it doesn't feel, and I might be wrong about this, it doesn't feel like open SUSE is on the forefront of developing technology as say Fedora is. One of the reasons why Fedora is so popular is because when a new piece of technology comes out, usually Fedora is the first to get it. And that's because of the people who develop. Fedora are also the ones that are working on things like pipe ware, things like Whalen, things like System D and all this stuff. Most of the technology comes from the Red Hat side of things and Fedora is the first distro to benefit from all that stuff. And because that's true, more people use Fedora, more people test Fedora because they're testing that technology on Fedora. Also, and this is just Frank Fax, Red Hat, which is the closest distro that is kind of associated with Fedora. It's sponsors Fedora. It's a much bigger thing than open SUSE is or in this case SUSE is. Now SUSE is a big corporation. They make a lot of money, a lot of people, a lot of corporations use SUSE as their distro of choice, but they're not nearly as big as Red Hat is. Not even close, right? Their revenue is like in the hundreds of millions where the Red Hat sponsored by IBM, they make billions of dollars. So you can tell that there's a significant size difference between these two groups and SUSE sponsors open SUSE and it's kind of correlatingly small just as compared to Fedora is. So part of the reason why open SUSE is so small is because it's just sponsored by a company that is also small. Also, and this is just a theory on my part, it's very much more of a European distro. Here in the United States, not a lot of people use open SUSE. There's a few of us out there that are very vocal about using it, but for some reason, open SUSE just seems to be more of a European distro. Now I don't know why that is because it can't be anything about Americans not liking open SUSE because it's European because a lot of people here use Ubuntu and Ubuntu is not based in America. You know, a lot of people use ARCOLINIX or whatever, that's developed by people who are not primarily here. So it can't be anything like that. I just, for whatever reason, you get the sense that open SUSE is much more popular across the pond than it is here. And while that is a very American-centric way of looking things, so just, I know all of that. You don't need to get into my comments and say, Matt, well, you're an American, you probably should broaden your horizons and talk about other things, whatever. I understand that I'm an American, I tend to have a point of view of an American, it's really hard for me to have a point of view of somebody who lives in Germany. I've never been to Germany, so I have no clue what they're thinking. I can't do that. So that's just kind of the sense that I get that open SUSE is much more popular over there than it is here. Part of that, and I would, again, just kind of my opinion of this, just my thoughts, is that I think that it's because SUSE is bigger over there. And people know about SUSE in the EU, whereas over here, SUSE is not as big as Red Hat is. It's just not, people have heard of Red Hat, and it got even worse when Red Hat was bought by IBM because everybody here, I don't know what the situation is elsewhere, but everybody here knows who IBM is. They've been around for 100 years. They've invented computing, basically, is what most people would say. And not true, but people think that. So those are the couple of reasons why I think open SUSE just kind of isn't as popular. Another reason why I think that it is not as popular as, say, Arch or Ubuntu or whatever, is because the community is a little bit different. They're more, and this is just my feeling, again, I have no scientific data to back this up. It feels like they're more introverted to me. The open SUSE guys, and you see this a lot in the forums, they just kind of, they stick together. They're very introverted. They're focused on the product. They're focused on just going about creating the best thing that they can. They're now out there in other people's forums saying, hey, you should use Arch. You should use Gen2, whatever. People who are using open SUSE seem to be less likely to tell people that they're using open SUSE. Now, this is obviously not universal, but it just feels like that, you know, every once in a while, you'll see in like Unix porn, someone using open SUSE, but they're not trying to sell open SUSE to you. They're not trying to get you to come over to the club and, you know, use open SUSE as well. Now, here's the thing. They now have me. I don't know if you guys noticed this, and this is gonna sound bad in the audio, but I have a sticker, and that sticker's gonna stay there for a little while. I'm also posting a lot of open SUSE content, so we're gonna change that. More people should use open SUSE, and I will be their ambassador. I'll be the best damn ambassador that there possibly could be. Open SUSE is amazing, and everybody should use it. I don't actually believe that everybody should use it, but everybody should try it. I think that if you tried open SUSE, you'd be very, very impressed with it. Now, all of that said, I have heard stories from other people who I've talked to and people I'm friends with who haven't had as a good experience in terms of hardware support as I have. I have had no hardware issues whatsoever. My Wi-Fi works on my laptop. My controllers work for Steam here on my desktop. The Bluetooth works. Everything has just worked really, really well. But I talked to people I'm asked about who at the beginning of my challenge, decided that they were going to go with the open SUSE as well, and they couldn't get it installed. They couldn't get it to work on their hardware setup. So, as is usual with Linux, if you have a weird hardware setup or you have a particular piece of hardware, and maybe just for whatever reason doesn't go well with open SUSE, maybe you'll have a different experience, and all you can do to know that is actually to try it. So, there's that. One last thing that I wanna talk about, I know this video has been extraordinarily longer than I thought it was going to be, and I have no clue how I'm gonna edit it all tonight, but we'll see. The last thing that I wanna talk about is ButterFS, and I'm just gonna talk about this briefly because I'm gonna make a whole another video on ButterFS. I know I've been promising on a ButterFS video for a very long time. I will get there, I promise. It's gonna be completely different than everybody thinks it's going to be, but whatever, you know, whatever. But ButterFS on open SUSE is one of its best features. It is fantastic. It comes with snapper out of the box, which means every time you do an update, it creates a snapshot. It just automatically does it. You can create your own snapshots very, very easily. And if something were to go wrong, you can just boot into that snapshot, roll back to it so that it's writable again and carry on with your day. Now that's not necessarily an open SUSE feature. You can get that on any distribution, but it's set up for you out of the box in such a way that if you wanna use some other ButterFS tools like ButterFS Assistant, if you wanna use Time Shift, if you wanna do that, it's set up in such a way that it actually works very well. It's just really, really good. Whereas the ButterFS setup on Fedora, they use a different naming scheme when it comes to your sub volumes, which means that Time Shift doesn't work. They also don't, as far as I know, actually use snapper. They use their own thing. I might be wrong about that. I never actually got into the whole snapshot thing on Fedora, so I'm just kinda talking on the side of my face on this, but I'm pretty sure that they don't use snapper, which means that the setup there is completely different. Now they do automatic snapshots on Fedora, but it didn't seem as intuitive for me as snapper does on OpenSusa. It's been fantastic. I've only had to use it once, and that was on a different install before I started the challenge. So since then, I haven't had to use it, but knowing that it's there, like the other day, for example, the XFC install that I had, which is my primary desktop environment on this system, when I installed it, the XFC stopped working. Don't know why, didn't really care because I wasn't using it anyways. So I just decided that I wanna install it. Now if anybody's ever tried to uninstall a desktop environment, you'll know that things tend to go wrong, especially when it's the one that was installed with the distro. So I did a snapper backup or a snapper snapshot before I uninstalled XFC. Now it turns out I didn't need it because it worked out phenomenally. Well, it's just I just uninstalled everything XFC for. System booted right up. The session was gone. It worked the way it was supposed to, but knowing that that snapshot was there, it just made it much more, it made me actually willing to do that. If I wanted to uninstall Plasma, which is even more notorious for breaking things when you uninstall it, I would create a snapshot of that before I uninstalled and that way I could go backwards. And I think that that piece of mind has just kind of changed the way I use the distro. It just kind of has allowed me to experiment a little bit better than I would if I didn't have that set up out of the box. So I know this has been a phenomenally long video. I also know that it's been a very rambly video. I'll try to add timestamps somewhere along the line. I'm not sure how well I'll do that, but I'll try. So you can jump around if you need to. Granted, if you've made it this far in the video, you probably have either already seen the timestamps or you just watched all the way through. Anyways, if that's so, leave a thumbs up on this video. I'd really appreciate it. There goes the camera again. What are you doing? Really weird. Anyways, leave a thumbs up on this video. It really helped the channel. If you want to follow me and master down on Odyssey, those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast. I'm also on Kofi at ko-fi.com slash the Linuxcast. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube, you guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the challenges when I'm anywhere near where it is right now. So thanks so very much for that. Without you, I seriously just, it wouldn't continue to happen the way it has been happening. So thank you so very much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.