openSUSE - First Thoughts

I started typing this as a Mastodon post but realized I had too much to say, so I wrote this entry instead.

Background

While I’m more or less fluent across the Debian derivatives, RHEL derivatives, and FreeBSD, I have never really used a SUSE Linux, despite the company being based here in Europe where I live.

Since Fedora is my normal choice, I figured the rolling release of openSUSE, Tumbleweed, would make the best comparison and what I would use if I was to switch.

I’ve been involved in some discussions regarding the novice friendliness and usability of Linux based operating systems related to the upcoming end-of-life of Windows 10, and I thought I’d try to approach this operating system from that perspective.

Installation

openSUSE is surprisingly hard to find. A web search for “suse” on DuckDuckGo shows the Wikipedia article for the company, and the web site for the commercial SUSE Linux Enterprise offerings. These are of course utterly pointless for a hobbyist wanting to set up a regular laptop. You need to know that what you’re looking for is called openSUSE.

Once past that hurdle, downloading the distribution and writing it to a USB stick is comparable to any other Linux distribution: Not something you’d expect just anyone to manage or even want to do, but not so hard that it would scare off a technically minded 13-year-old. I consider the first choice on any page to be the default one that most people should take, and on the openSUSE web page, Tumbleweed is that choice.

Once booted, the installer is graphical, so shouldn’t scare anybody away. Most default choices seem to be sane, but I would like to see two main changes to the installer:

• The first screen, where you choose your network settings is not intuitive. You have to highlight your preferred network connection and then click on a separate key to edit its settings. Also, setting your machine’s hostname is a completely separate flow. Nobody who understands a bit about networking will have any issues completing the task, but there definitely exists a happy-path here that the installer could guide you through rather than forcing you to discover the various options on your own.
• The default disk partitioning flow has good defaults, but I miss a choice for full-disk encryption without having to dig down into the advanced settings. Also there was no easy way to manually make changes like resizing existing partitions or similar and then get a new disk layout recommendation based on the new configuration. This is less of a problem, though, as I would expect most who install a system like this would perform a clean install of a single system.

Out-of-the-box experience

I know that SUSE has traditionally been a Plasma (KDE) Linux distribution in the same way Red Hat has defaulted to Gnome. But since I do prefer Gnome, and the installer provides Gnome as its second option, that’s what I opted to use. This means I can’t speak for the Plasma user experience for someone who starts openSUSE Tumbleweed, but in Gnome, a novice is left with very little help. There is a welcome screen, but it completely fails to guide the user to YaST - arguably SUSE’s big selling point - even for someone who knows to search for it.

Searching for Software brings up the Gnome Software app, which in this distribution only seems to be an interface for installing Flatpak apps. The next search hits are two instances of YaST Software ... which is abbreviated so the user is left to guess what each program does, and two instances of Myrlyn with no further explanation. Again, for a novice, this is not discoverable, and not a great initial user experience.

Final thoughts

I already like Tumbleweed as a Gnome-based operating system. The team behind the operating system seem to have done a very good job in many of the areas that you’re likely to care about over time. I like that they’ve seemingly implemented a variation of the FreeBSD style boot environment concept in Snapper, made possible thanks to BtrFS snapshot capability. I would frankly prefer to see more distributions than Ubuntu take ZFS seriously, but this at least goes some of the way - and further than you’d get out-of-the-box with Fedora or Ubuntu.

Again, I don’t know how the Plasma first login experience looks in Tumbleweed, but what I saw from Gnome is very likely to scare new users off - completely unnecessarily. There’s not a whole lot needed, but explain the benefits of YaST, provide a big honking icon pinned to the dock, and announce its presence and general usefulness via the Welcome screen.

I’m not sure whether it’s just my narrow social circle, but SUSE just doesn’t seem to have the mind share of Ubuntu or Fedora, and having tried it, I don’t really see why not. Again, there’s some work to be done in the new user experience, but I really think openSUSE should be more popular than it seems to be. The next time you’re bored with your operating system and want to shake things up a bit, try it out!