It seems like its a perfect distro. Rolling release so you get recent packages and dont have huge upgrades every few months, but not so bleeding edge that it breaks often. YaST is pretty cool but you are not forced to use it. Basic installation gives you enough essential stuff, but its not too bloated. The only thing its missing is AUR, but i still didnt find a program that i need and cant find in official repos or trough flatpak.
Honestly, now that i use it, it seems like insanity to install anything else. (for everyday desktop use)
Here are a few reasons I can think why some may not take to it. Trigger warning for Suse users
- Out-of-the-box aesthetics are pretty ugly (why are they still using that godawful default wallpaper?)
- Yast looks like the Windows 95 control panel (I guess this might be a plus for some people?)
- Zypper can be sluggish to update and install packages
- regular package updates are large, even compared to Arch
- Seems to have more frequent security/password prompts (a good thing for enterprise scenarios, but not always welcome or necessary on a personal PC)
It’s not bad by any means, but I’ve tried it out several times and always ended up abandoning it because of little niggles like the above.
Yast to me looks reassuringly old and sturdy.
Software avaliability can be a bit scarce too, mainly when compared to fedora or even arch’s aur
Also it would sacrifice user experience over “security” - i.e. with default SElinux config proton may not work correctly - see this bug
yast can be ugly, but effective. And aesthetics are definitely subjective. Agree about zypper though.
I see a lot of clueless interpretations of openSUSE in this thread. Like any other distro, you have to learn how it works. Most people here don’t want to bother and keep arguing that it doesn’t work like Arch, etc. Well, it’s not Arch… duh.
Of course, by now, you’ve realized that the defaults are good and it’s very stable. Unlike other rolling distros, it rarely breaks from an update because every release is automatically tested. BUT, issues do arise with the repo NVIDIA drivers, which don’t always get built fast enough to work with newer kernels as they are released. It’s not a big deal because you only need to wait ~1 week, but surprisingly, the maintainers don’t preemptively address it. Also, codecs can be problematic because, like the NVIDIA repo, they lag behind and take time to catch up to the OSS repo. Annoying, to be sure, but if you are using flatpaks, it doesn’t matter.
And this is probably a shocker to most people here, but you don’t have to install Yast. I don’t use it at all. The catch is that you must learn something new and how to hold back certain packages.
If you like to brag that you use Arch or Gentoo, or you like a rolling update to occasionally break your system Manjaro style do not use OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Otherwise, go ahead and enjoy. I’ve used for over a year without issue. It’s fantastic.