 OpenSUSA is one of those distributions that just kind of exists when it comes to the desktop space. It's very popular in enterprise and in server, but when it comes to desktop usage, it's pretty small. It has its fans, obviously, but it doesn't come across as large as Fedora or Ubuntu or Arch or any of those other distributions that we talk about literally all the time. So what I wanted to do today was talk about OpenSUSA. Is OpenSUSA good when it comes to desktop usage? And that's really what we're going to focus on. But before we jump in, what I'd like you to do if you haven't already is drop a like on this video because it would really help the channel. Now, let's go ahead and jump in. So OpenSUSA comes in two varieties, Tumbleweed and Leap. Tumbleweed is a more rolling release distribution. It has very up-to-date packaging similar to Arch, whereas Leap is a static release distribution similar to Ubuntu or the like. So it has a dedicated release schedule and you have version numbers, right? So that is the way those two versions work. I've been using Tumbleweed now for a little bit under a week or so. I have installed it on my main computer. I've been using it full time and so far it has been really good. So let me show you this right here. Now, I have been admittedly using Qtile as my daily driver on OpenSUSA, but I wanted to show you the plasma version of OpenSUSA as it is right now. I've done a little bit of customizing because I have spent some time here, but most of my time has been on Qtile. But I wanted to have this be more of a normal person's first look, whatever, because I don't want to focus on Qtile when there's not a Qtile version available to everybody. So this is OpenSUSA Tumbleweed and it is a distribution that comes with several different desktop environments to choose from. So you can choose from GNOME, KDE, XFCE. I think there may be a Mate version. I'm not sure about that. I can't honestly remember. I know there are several different options during the installer, and that's one of the coolest things about it. The installer is that you can choose the desktop environment that you want as you're installing it. A lot of different distributions choose to have just a dedicated ISO for each desktop environment. OpenSUSA allows you to choose during install, which is nice. In terms of overall installation, it is a tad bit dated, I would say. It's not the greatest installer ever. If you've ever installed Fedora before, they're very similar. To be honest with you, they're not exactly the same. They're not the same installer, but they're similar. The one thing I will say about the installer, and this is me directly talking to the OpenSUSA developers and OpenSUSA, is please, for the love of all that's holy, get rid of the terms of service at the beginning. Yes, there is a TOS that you have to agree to at the beginning of the OpenSUSA installer. I understand legality may need to be there. I don't know. Not a lawyer. I'm not sure exactly why it needs to be there though. I will be 100% honest and say that I've never read it. Has anybody ever read a terms of service before? Is that a thing that people do? Maybe there are terms of service nerds out there and I just don't know about it. The other day, I spent an hour reading through the zipper man page. I'll actually show you the man page for zipper. This is the man page for zipper. I spent an hour or so reading through this and it was highly entertaining. I am such a nerd. I had so much fun. Maybe there are people out there who spend their time reading terms of service. Maybe that's a thing. I don't know, but I really think that the OpenSUSA installer would be much better without the terms of service front and center. I don't know. Maybe that's just a personal opinion, but whatever. The point is that it does have terms of service that you have agreed to and that's the oddest part about the installation. Seriously. It's weird. Anyways, once you have installed and you have chosen your desktop environment, you're presented with something that looks a little bit like this. Your desktop may look a little bit different because I've changed themes and stuff like that. Overall, it's a traditional desktop environment experience. And then what really makes OpenSUSA different is two things. The package manager from the terminal perspective and the GUI package manager. Now, when I call it the GUI package manager, I'm really underselling the things that Yast does. So let's talk about Yast first. So Yast, if you do this, it's going to ask you for your password because everything is done with sudo here. This is OpenSUSA's do-it-all application. And when I say do-it-all, I mean literally do-it-all. It will install updates. It will install software. It will remove software. It can manage your Samba server. It can add users. It can add groups. It can add, you know, it can change your network settings. It can change the date and time. You know, you literally, you name it. Hell, it even manages to look at your logs and stuff like that. So it does literally everything, including actually create virtual machines, which I didn't even know that it did, to be honest with you. I never even looked that far down. So they have these sections off and it has a ton of stuff that you can do. And their reliance on Yast is central to the OpenSUSA experience, right? This is the place where you do your things. You do your updates. You install your software. You manage your bootloader. You partition drives if you wanted to do that. You manage your date and time. You can even change a lot of the plasma settings from right here. If you wanted to do that, you can manage the firewall. You can manage other security settings. You can change a lot of your SSH and host names and proxy settings and stuff like that. Literally, everything is done inside of Yast if you want to do it. Now, just because doing it here exists doesn't mean you can't do it in the normal Linux way. So if you wanted to manage your printers, you can do that with the traditional ways of doing things. If you wanted to manage your bootloader, you could do that with GrubConfig and all that stuff. If you wanted to do that, you could. But the OpenSUSA experience heavily relies on Yast. So yeah, that is Yast. I could honestly do an entire video on Yast. And if you'd really like me to do so, hop on down to the comments and let me know. Because seriously, there's a lot of stuff here that I could cover. I'm just kind of doing a flyby here. So if you're interested in a dedicated video on Yast, let me know. Because we could nerd out for a very long time on Yast. That is the primary gooey way of doing things in OpenSUSA. And honestly, as far as I can tell from my time using OpenSUSA in the past and over the last three or four days, Yast is really truly what makes OpenSUSA special in terms of desktop experience. Right? Yes, it's underlying technologies like it has ButterFS as the default file system. It has Snapper installed by default and set up for you. So if you wanted to do read-only snapshots, you have all of that pre-enabled for you. So if you install something that doesn't go over well, you can always roll back if you wanted to. So ButterFS is all set up. It's actually set up much better in terms of default settings for ButterFS than Fedora is. Fedora uses really odd subvolume names and makes it a pain in the ass to actually use things like TimeShift or whatever. OpenSUSA is not like that. It has Snapper installed and it's just the traditional OpenSUSA ButterFS layout. It's very nice. The terminal software package manager is called Zipper. So Zipper is similar to apt. It's similar to Pacman in certain ways. Right? Install software manages your software on your system. That's basically what Zipper does. And if you've ever used apt before, some of the syntax is actually the same. So like Zipper install will install something. Zipper remove will remove something. Zipper search will search through the repositories. Now most of these things will require sudo. So that wasn't the precise command that you need to use. You need sudo, Zipper install if you wanted to install something and so on and so forth. That's the default long form syntax for managing files inside of the terminal. So install, search, remove, verify is another one of them that you could use. There's several different ones that you can use for Zipper to do things. Just so you can with any other package manager. What I really like about Zipper is that you don't have to type in everything. So if I wanted to install something, I could just do sudo, Zipper in and that would install something. If I wanted to search for something, I could do sudo, Zipper SC. I'm not sure if I needed to sudo there or not, but you get the point. Zipper SC will search for something. Zipper RM will remove something. So I like that they have managed to do something that's just a little bit differently than all the rest of the package managers in terms of syntax. Arch has taken being different way too far and totally messed up their syntax in terms of actually intuitive syntax. Nobody knows what dash capital S means. Although I'm told that it means sync. I don't know why you're synchronizing when you're installing something. Those two things don't correlate for me personally, but I'm sure there was some kind of mental leap there for them, right? But there the arch syntax is very weird, whereas the syntax for Debbie based distributions is very easy. Same thing with Adora. Adora basically uses the same syntax as apt as well. Open Suiza has taken it a step further and made it just a little bit easier. So you don't have to type in entire words. It saves you a few keystrokes. Now, the biggest complaint that people have about zipper is that it is slow. So if I do sudo zipper refresh here, I'm not sure if this is going to prove my point or not, because I might have already done it once today. But if you see this actually, it's not going to go bad because everything's up to date. But if any of these were to have to be updated, it would be slow. The thing about zipper is that the refreshing of repositories for whatever reason does take quite a long time, and it has to do it fairly often. It's very similar to Ubuntu like that, whereas if you want to install something, almost certainly you're going to have to do sudo apt update, right? You have to update the repositories, update the mirrors, whatever you want to call them. Zippers very similar to that. Arch does that as well, although it doesn't seem to be as frequent as it does on Open Suiza. Now, personally, I used Fedora for almost a year. DNF is very, very slow as well when it comes to updating repositories. Even if you choose a different mirror, a lot of times the DNF refresh of the mirrors takes quite a while. Zippers the same. So I haven't, well, I do say it is slower than DNF. Really, it's only just by a little. So if you have been able to put up with DNF, you're not going to complain too much about zipper. If you've used Pacman or you've used apt, which are two faster packet managers, you'll notice that zipper is slower. That's not a deal breaker, but it is something that you may know is that zippers is slower. And it does show up a lot more when you're installing a lot of software, either you're installing new software or you're doing updates. So if I do sudo zipper up like this, it's going to look for things. And in that time, it didn't take quite as long, but it does take a little while. Now, there's another one called zipper DUP, which is going to be a distro upgrade. The man page doesn't do a fantastic job of telling you what the difference is or which one you're supposed to run it. Well, I should take the back. It does a fine job of telling you what the difference is. It doesn't tell you which one you should run all the time in the information it gives you here. It tells you you probably should run zipper DUP in order to upgrade everything. So usually on tumbleweed, you're going to want to use DUP. I think on leap, you'll use just you the zipper UP or upgrade. So I think that those are the differences there. I'm still kind of learning that. So the slowness of zipper can't be denied, but it hasn't been that big of a deal for me. Honestly, like I said, because I'm used to to DNF and DNF is slow. So the third space that I need to talk about in terms of what makes open Sousa open Sousa is the software availability. Now, originally in my first like two days here, I was not all that impressed with the package availability on open Sousa. I even tutored about it on Macedon. I was like, you know, the software availability, not that great, especially for more unique packages, things like Rofi power menu, things like clip menu D, things like MPC. MPC is a terminal based front end for MPD, which is a music player, right? And it basically what I use MPC for is to allow me to play and pause using a key binding. It's because I don't have the media controls on my keyboard. So I want to create custom key bunnings for play and pause and forward and previous and MPC allows me to do that. But MPC, I thought was not in the repositories, which is really weird because MPC is in every single repository I've ever experienced before. So it was really weird that MPC didn't seem to be in the repositories. Now open Sousa does have something called the open build service. That's this thing here. Now, I don't know all the ins and outs of the OBS yet. I'm still just very slowly getting my footing when it comes to what this thing actually is. I want to say it's kind of like copper on Fedora, but it's actually not. It's not the same thing. So I won't even make that comparison. It does different things. It allows you to build packages and host packages and repositories. I'm not actually sure again what it is. I'm still learning it. I have some documentation open here for the open build service. I have a couple of talks that have gone on on YouTube about the open build service and such. So I have some learning to do when it comes to that. But what I've discovered so far is that it allows you to install some packages hosted by other people or at least hope it hosted by open Sousa that aren't in the traditional repository. So like MPC, if I hope if I search for MPC, this is where I was really very interested in the software availability of open Sousa because MPC doesn't come up. MPC QT is not the same thing. MPC QT is a GUI front end for MPC, not a terminal based MPC. And if you scroll down here, you see one here called MPC, which is called the make project creator, which is not the same thing. And then you just keep scrolling in there. It's just it's not here, right? And I was shocked by this. So even in the the extra repositories that open Sousa offers through the open build service, MPC is not there. So I thought, right? I spent two days, you know, looking for it. Well, just I didn't spend two days looking for more. I spent two days thinking about it coming back to it every once in a while. And then eventually I just decided to build MPC myself, which required me getting Mason and Ninja set up, which is not something I'm all that happy about. Turns out that MPC is called MPC client on open Sousa. MPC client is MPC everywhere else, but it's called MPC client on open Sousa. And every time I think that there's a package that's not available on open Sousa, usually it's because it's named something different. Now, different names for packages is not unusual across distributions. Arch and Ubuntu and Debian, all of them name packages in a slightly different way. Debian, for instance, which I'm long term testing on my laptop tends to put really weird words in front of the name of the package. It's a very long, usually hyphenated package name, usually with a some kind of developer focused word at the front. That's the way Debian does it. Ubuntu seems to clean that up sometimes, but also not always because they use a lot of the Debian stuff. So you can see that it'd be similar. And Arch usually has the most sane package names, at least in my experience. Open Sousa, on the other hand, I really wasn't expecting things to be this weird, right? In some cases, right? MPC has just always been MPC. And that's kind of the way it is across all distributions. So maybe it's just the type of packages that I'm looking for that usually just kind of stay the same. In this case, package availability has been perfectly fine. Just if you're going to use this, just know that a lot of times the packages are named something different, even if they're close. And what's weird is if we go back to the open build service search page, we won't actually see MPC MP client on this page here, even though that it should be here. So if we actually search for MP client, like so, it will eventually come up, I believe. Yeah, so you'll get the page. And this is just the official release. Usually when you see official release, that means it's in the repositories that you have available on your computer already. That means you shouldn't have to use any of the stuff that's on this website. You can just install it from the terminal or you can install it from Yast. I think if I used Yast more, Yast is in the GUI, I probably wouldn't have the same problems because it's easier to search through things. Whereas with Zipper, you kind of have to know what you're searching for, right? You have to kind of know the general name. So that's one area where I've kind of had some issues. It has nothing really to do with open source, just more with my noobness, if I can say that. Now, if I go back to, let's just say we wanted to install the QT version of this. So there is, it looks like a official release of this, which means it's in the repositories. But let's just say this thing here doesn't exist. And it was something that you had to download from the open build service. There is a way to do that here. And you click it, you can either do the one click install, which will download a YMP file, which will, if you double click on it, will install it through Yast. It's similar to installing a flat pack from FlatHub from the website. It's very similar to that. Or supposedly you can hit this expert download, click on the thing here, and then if you wanted to do it through the terminal, supposedly you would do these things. Now, obviously MPC QT is in the repository, so it doesn't make any sense to do it this way. But some things aren't in the repositories. And if you wanted to do things through the terminal, which I usually want to do, this particularly long line of text that you have to enter, you know, obviously copy and paste or whatever. And then you repress it. Basically this is, this is the equivalent of adding a copper repo. It's the equivalent of adding a PPA somewhat the equivalent. This is all hosted by open SUSE. So it's not hoping hosted by random people, but you get that. It's closer to copper, I would say, than PPAs. The idea is kind of the same. Anyways, you do this. And supposedly you'd be able to install MPC or whatever package you're trying to do. I haven't had any luck doing this yet. So every time I've tried this with packages that aren't in the repositories, for whatever reason, I get up for a forer. I'm not sure if that would happen if I tried this, you know, right here live or not. But for whatever reason, this hasn't been working for me through the open build service, probably because I'm doing something wrong. So overall package and software availability, management, something like that is very good on open SUSE zipper is a little slow. The package names are a little bit different sometimes. So you kind of have to kind of deal with those two things. I prefer doing all my package manager through the through zipper, just because I'm more familiar with doing things through the terminal. But if you would like to use a GUI, yes, is a good way of doing that. It's not user friendly. So that's kind of where I'm going to end this video overall, because I'm not going to talk about gaming or anything like that. I've only been using it for four days. I will say that I managed to install steam and proton GE through the SUSE repositories. And it's been working fine. I've been playing kingdoms and castles or castles and kingdoms or whatever it's called of the last two days. It's played it's played beautifully. It's been perfectly fine. So this was not ever meant to be review. And usually in these, is it good type of videos? What I want to focus on in terms of a distro is the package management package availability thing, because that's really what makes a distribution special. Katie Plasma is Katie Plasma, no matter what distribution you're on, right? If you're going to use tumbleweed, you're going to get the brand new version of plasma, the blend brand new version of GNOME, the brand new version of XSE, which is also the old version of XSE. So, you know, you have all the latest versions of the packages that you want if you're using tumbleweed. If you are using leap, you're going to be more on a more static release. So you'll might end up with a version of plasma that's a little bit older, a version of GNOME is a little bit older. But overall, GNOME is GNOME. Plasma is plasma. You get the idea, right? So I don't want to focus on, hey, these are the pre installed applications that come with a distribution that doesn't make any sense to me anymore. You know, because it's so easy to install or uninstall applications. So what does it matter what comes pre installed? I always want to focus on the package management and the software availability, because I think that that's what truly matters when it comes to a distribution. So in terms of open SUSE, package management is good. But yes, in terms of a GUI package manager is not new. I said user friendly earlier. What I meant to say was new user friendly. And that's fine. Okay, because not every distribution has to be new user friendly. And in this case, it's not even really new Linux users that I'm talking about. I'm talking about people who are new to open SUSE. Yes, take some getting used to because it is really a one stop shop for everything. And while everything is really well organized, as you saw, it does take some getting used to navigating through that space. It works phenomenally well. Yast is awesome. It's like it's one of the best tools on Linux, I think. But it does take a little bit of a learning curve in order to get your mental self around what that thing actually is and what it does. And chances are you'll forget that Yast exists in the first few days of you using open SUSE. And you'll have to remind yourself that if there's something that you want to do, you have to go use Yast or you could go use Yast. I should say there are other ways of doing things, but Yast is where they really want you to do stuff. So Yast does have a learning curve, you know, and that just is the way it is. And that's not a bad thing. I'm not criticizing it, but it does, you know, it's just something to keep in mind if you're going to use it in terms of the two more terminal stuff. Zipper, as I said, biggest flaws, flaws. I guess the biggest flaw is that it is slow. That is just it's facts, right? You ask any open SUSE or anybody who's used open SUSE and used it before, their first thing is going to tell you is it's slow. And it is it's slow. It's but it's fine for me. I'm used to it being slow. I will complain about it and then just move on with my day in terms of software availability. Again, it seems to be very, very good. There have been I think Rofi Powerman is the only thing that I found that I haven't been able to actually find in the repositories. Once I've discovered the names and it's possible that Rofi power menu is actually there somewhere just under a different name and I haven't found it yet. That's possible. But in turn, mostly has been very, very good. Qtile was there. Rofi was there. You know, kiddie was there. X, X, XHKD was there. All of the window manager stuff that I need in order to build my setup was all there in the repositories. And that was really good. So in terms of answering the question is open SUSE a good. Yes, it is going to be my distribution for a while. I think I'm going to stick around here for quite a bit and see how well it goes. Now I'm still reviewing Debian. Don't worry. I'm not reneging on that promise. I have that installed on my laptop and I installed it on my standing desk today. So I've been messing around with Debian overall. Bookworm has been very good, but I just want to let you know I'm not moving past that. Also, you guys probably wondering what happened to Fedora. Well, if you want to find that out, you can subscribe to my Patreon where I am posting a Patreon only podcast about why I switched away from Fedora so quickly after making a video saying I was switching to Fedora. It was literally within three days. Nothing wrong with Fedora. Spoiler alert. So that's it for this video. If you haven't already, drop a like on this video. I'd really appreciate it. It really does help the channel. You can follow me on Massive Honor Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel is not even near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very, very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. Seriously, guys, thank you for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I hope you have a wonderful day. I hope you have a wonderful week. I'll see you next time.