Thoughts on openSUSE Tumbleweed

I’ve been running openSUSE Tumbleweed for a little while now, and feel that I can speak a bit about it.

Please keep in mind that I’ve been ignoring my own advice to run a system the way its creators intended, and I’ve been using it with Gnome rather than with Plasma, so what I say here may not necessarily be valid if you choose the default desktop environment.

Compared to Fedora, which is very Gnome-centric, openSUSE clearly wants you to use the various tools provided under the YaST umbrella to manage the machine and its installed software. The tools clearly have been thought through, and being GUI tools, they provide a lot of discoverability to a new user. However, there’s always the feeling that they’re rooted in the UX mindset of late nineties/early noughties Microsoft. Think of a setting and you’ll probably find it, but first you need to find the right YaST sub-program.

Compared to Fedora’s Gnome Software interface, the YaST software installer is clearly superior at providing an overview of what’s installed and what will be installed to fulfill the dependencies if you add another software package to your computer. The issue is that again, the experience is.. practical? Definitely. Nice? Not really. Add to this that the SUSE software manager has no integration at all with Gnome Software, and you get weirdness like Gnome notifying you that there are software updates available, but when you click the notification, Software opens and tells you there are no updates to be had.

Weirdly, if you search for update, one of the early hits is the YaST2 online_update tool. That doesn’t show any available patches either. If you by chance open YaST2 Software Management, you can install new software, but there’s nowhere there to update installed packages. So down to the terminal we go, and then we need to know that zypper update and zypper dup (“dist upgrade”) are distinct functions, and while you’re warned against using the dist upgrade command on “regular” SUSE, on Tumbleweed, conversely, you may apparently see negative consequences if you happen to try a regular update rather than a dist upgrade for keeping your system updated.

All in all, I see how for someone who came from Windows to Linux, SUSE - and especially SUSE with the Plasma desktop environment - could be of help in extending their comfort zone to include a discoverable and serious-feeling Linux distribution. But after a couple of weeks of usage, I have a hard time seeing where it would improve my own life. And as I’ve alluded to in both this post and in a previous one, this system isn’t exactly user friendly enough that I would recommend it to a novice Linux user either. So what am I missing? Who is it for?