I would like to ask if openSuse Tumbleweed is a good option for daily driving ang gaming.
Definitely! Depending on your hardware configuration and the games you play, it might even give you a significant performance boost. For completeness’ sake, it’s important to note that most of the (potential) gains in performance are related to having a more recently released kernel. So similar gains would have been had simply by using something like Arch or Fedora. Furthermore, other factors -like scheduler, custom kernel patches for additional performance and how the packages have been compiled etc- are perhaps also avenues worth exploring in that regard. However that’s a potential can of worms I would rather keep closed in this discussion.
Furthermore, openSUSE Tumbleweed comes with great defaults, which is in clear contrast to Arch that comes with (little to) no defaults. This makes it significantly easier to just install and get on with business, something which you might be already familiar with if you’ve used Linux Mint and Ubuntu. However, compared to those, openSUSE Tumbleweed might require you to perform some additional steps related to codecs and whatnot. This is nothing out of the ordinary as Fedora would have required it as well. Out of ‘the big bois’, only Ubuntu has been able to solve this through a single-click during installation. Note; this is not a technical matter but a legal one. Thankfully, openSUSE offers great documentation to solve this as smoothly as possible.
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that openSUSE Tumbleweed, contrary to all the other distros that have been mentioned, is configured with Snapper+Btrfs out of the box. This is IMO a must-have on any reliable system as it allows one to rollback to a working system whenever your system seems to have been borked somehow. The other distros allow you to set this (or similar solutions) up yourself, however openSUSE is the only one that does this for you. Furthermore, if security is of any concern to you, but you’re not that knowledgeable on the subject, thus requiring your distro to do the heavy-lifting, then once again openSUSE Tumbleweed (together with Fedora) performs best out of ‘the big bois’.
After mentioning such praise one might ask “What’s the catch?”, because -somehow- openSUSE Tumbleweed isn’t as represented in the online discourse compared to Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. And honestly, I don’t know why it is so criminally underrated. So in that regard, it’s quite unfortunate that it can’t quite reap the benefits of having a huge involved community like the others have. And perhaps that’s where the catch is…; it doesn’t have as big of a user base -> limited user base isn’t able to contribute to it so that it becomes as ‘competitive’ as the more popular distros -> potential new users don’t pick or stick to openSUSE because package/function X (or whatever) is absent -> it doesn’t have as big of a user base… To give an example; I really like to have a secure system. And while openSUSE is one of the best to offer that out of the box, it unfortunately doesn’t allow me to further harden it by installing a hardened kernel without myself becoming the maintainer of said package. This is in clear contrast to Arch, Debian and Fedora that offer access to repos that contain a hardened kernel; be it through the AUR, COPR or the repo maintained by the folks over at Kicksecure.
The graphics card I have is Nvidia if its any relevant.
Perhaps openSUSE Tumbleweed will require you to put in more effort -compared to Ubuntu- to make sure this works as intended. However, thankfully, the documentation has got you covered.
Thanks for the detailed reply! The limited userbase is definitely something to think about. Thankfully, I like reading documentaion and it’s nice to know openSUSE has that!
Though, I couldn’t help but wonder the motivation behind your inquiry. Are you just exploring the waters beyond Ubuntu? Are you interested in rolling release and got curious when you learned what openSUSE Tumbleweed had to offer in that space? Were you perhaps looking for a distro well-suited for gaming and did you perhaps come across someone mentioning openSUSE Tumbleweed which subsequently peaked your interest? Are you perhaps unhappy for some reason with Ubuntu and looking for something to replace it with?
Lots of questions, of which I don’t expect you to answer more than a couple (if at all). I would already be more than happy if you could provide us a bit more insight regarding the motivation behind your inquiry.
I’m currently daily driving Windows due to uni but once that’s done I want to fully switch to Linux. I’m just starting to spread my wings outside of Ubuntu right and see what’s out there. Heard of openSUSE Tumbleweed from websites and youtube and thought “Hey why not give it a shot”. The UI looks real neat as well. I’m not really looking for a gaming focused distro right now. Just something that I can daily drive and occasionally play games with.
I’m just starting to spread my wings outside of Ubuntu right and see what’s out there.
As you must have been aware of by now; there are hundreds of distros out there. Which obviously makes it a daunting task to find your distro with that overwhelming amount of distros to potentially choose from. However, quite fortunately, the vast majority is actually not even worth considering as a daily driver. Arguably only the popular independent distros (Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Slackware and Ubuntu^[1]^ etc^[2]^) are noteworthy, unless you’ve got very specific wants and/or needs that are only easily accessible through a derivative of theirs. Out of these, Gentoo is perhaps too much of a deep dive at this point in your Linux journey. Slackware ain’t bad, but as you’ve already had some experience with modern Linux distros, I find it rather unlikely that you would enjoy using it; though, perhaps, you might one day (read: decades down the line). So…, only five distros remain… On that note, for whatever it’s worth, openSUSE Tumbleweed definitely stands out positively among these IMO (though perhaps another one might be shining even brighter (obviously biased 😜)).
The UI looks real neat as well.
Interesting. Are you referring to the desktop environment? Which -actually- should be reproducible on most other distros*. Or perhaps you’re actually referring to YaST? Which is openSUSE’s excellent configuration tool; perhaps closest thing that Linux has to Windows’ Control Panel. Some even regard it as openSUSE’s killer-feature, especially because most other distros (aside from MX Linux) only come with relatively basic configuration tools by comparison. In retrospect, I probably should have mentioned it in my earlier comment 😅.
I’m not really looking for a gaming focused distro right now.
I’m actually glad you aren’t; they generally tend to miss out on polish. If you do end up looking into one, then I’d argue it’s better to run a dedicated distro as such -perhaps as a dual boot- for all your gaming needs instead of trying to game heavily on your daily driver, unless you find that too cumbersome and/or fear for issues related to storage. I’m aware that this is probably an unpopular take*.
Just something that I can daily drive and occasionally play games with.
Aight, got ya. Well, in that case, openSUSE Tumbleweed is definitely worth considering.
I am very aware that Ubuntu is technically not quite as independent as the others are.
I felt the likes of Alpine, Guix, NixOS, Puppy, Solus and Void are at least worth mentioning as independent distros.
One more point that you shouldn’t let scare you away, but just something nice to know going into OpenSUSE: by default, the distro is FOSS only, the official software repositories don’t have things like proprietary multimedia codecs or other non-free (as in free speech) software included. You have to enable these yourself if you want them (to, say, watch MP4 files perhaps).
This has gotten so dead simple recently that it can be done in a couple of terminal commands, it’s just important to mention. If you know it going in, it saves the step of “what the heck, why aren’t my media files playing??”
sudo zypper install opi
opi codecs
OPI is a package manager for installing software from a few sources, namely the openSUSE Build Service (which is where OPI gets its name, OBS Package Iinstaller), Microsoft, the Packman repositories, and a few others. Installing codecs is the only thing I have ever used it for, though.
You know, I was talking about actual zippers in another thread at around the same time I was writing this, and my brain just went with it. Doesn’t help that I have aliases for all my regular zypper commands and haven’t actually typed it out in awhile. 😅
Well there is a lot to critizise on Windows, but to be honest i didnt have any Problems with Updates, crashes, installing Software and drivers or anything Else on Windows in years. Even upgrading from win 10 to 11 caused no issues. I do want to switch to Linux when the Hardware and Software i need is eventually supported, because i dont like all the privacy issues on Windows, but from a Performance and stability point of view i really cant complain about Windows at the Moment
I‘m not sure what your usecase is but it sure aint mine. As a windows administrator for roughly 10 yrs now, I very much prefer linux. I‘ve had to set up tons of windows machines and a couple linux machines and working with linux is like one tenth of the hassle in every department.
Install? 1/10th of the time Upgrade 1/10th of time and errors
And so on.
Most importantly, you need to get very familiar with the powershell if you want to work at least somewhat efficient which is like delving into linux.
Like, you invest hours to understand the shell, in that time you understood linux.
I started with windows 95, later also delved in 3.0.
It has been 25 yrs on windows and most of the complexity is totally unnecessary. It‘s like if you buy a crm for your company. They are naturally grown to benefit customers and not designed well. That is how windows works imo. They kind if need a big refactor.
I also use it since win 95. And really gad no Problems over the last years. Maybe the start if win10 was a little rough but after that no issues.I have used it for All kind of stuff: gaming, graphics 3d and 2d, game dev, programming, a lot of music production, writing and just tinkering around. I am no admin though, so i have no opinion on that. The only Thing where performance was bad, was on my old laptop which i Switched to Linux, but on my main PC no complaints. I do wish to switch to Linux at some point but right now some Software and Hardware i use just isnt supported, so there is really no good reason to switch now.
Thats actually a funny coincidence. Windows 95 was kinda hilarious.
So, there lies the problem then: being and admin/poweruser is very different from being a user. You make things work in different ways, make things work for others (helpdesk) who may not be as formidable in using windows.
But what I don’t understand is: if you write software, you often have to install tons of stuff which then make problems for example due to the windows firewall not updating. I thought a dev would experience that as well.
Any my personal favorites: trying to upgrade windows versions, the fucking rescue partitions on oem computers where you dont get a license key which you can use to do a fresh install but have to restore the infinitely bloated oem version.
If you work on cutting edge hardware or at least very freshly realeased hardware, the constant driver issues, having to use things like this driver tool that I forgot the name of to actually have the best drivers for your hardware and so on.
Then there was the buggy messes called me, vista and 8 which were a constant struggle against badly written code and idiotic, hard to deactivate features.
TL;DR: Windows works if you don‘t ask to be private, performant or secure.
TL;DR: Windows works if you don‘t ask to be private, performant or secure.
Don't forget to add "punctual"... for when you need to do something right now but you can't because Microsoft decided to have your computer do something else instead.
I can count the number of times where a Windows update crushed my schedule - 0.
I've used Windows since Windows 3.0. I don't need to badmouth Linux to make me feel good about my choice of OS (though I can - I've enough experience with half a dozen different varieties of Linux to be more than happy to just use my computers, rather than spend my time managing them).
You look like something of an expert on shit-takes.
I didn't say it shouldn't matter when it happens to you.
But it's hard to take seriously the comments of someone who clearly thinks they know more than they actually do. Someone who wants to use cutting edge hardware, but who isn't smart enough to manage the drivers.
Well, good for you. As I previously mentioned, I made a different experience and dozens of my clients as well.
And to comment on Linux: It is a community driven, open source product which will never be as polished as a proprietary, for profit product with thousands of sw engineers working on it full time.
Even if windows was a unparalleled experience, which it is not, it would still be privacy invasive and much less innovative as linux is.
Idk, for me, and many others I know, windows update always caused shit. There were many times that windows has failed to update for me, and often the updates broke something in the process. Far more than they ever have on linux for me.
One time, a Windows 10 update unmounted my wife’s main drive and decided it would only boot to the backup copy she had on another drive. That was a fun one to troubleshoot.
@MasterCelebrator
me neither, since i have a strong pc. but have you ever used windows on someone else's computer? slow af. and theres nothing to be done about it since its just the way windows is set up. maybe you can disable services running in the background but even then. i could go on but I'd start rambling @Freez@linux
Depending on the games you play. Steam on linux really works well. I have not had a dualboot windows partition for games in several years.
There are some games with windows only drm/anticheat, that do not work. I just do not buy them. There are enough games that works well on linux that I do not care.
I’m really surprised at how much people are ripping on Linux here at lemmy. It’s completely justified, I agree that Linux still needs some polish in a few areas before it can REPLACE windows, but I would’ve figured lemmy to be a bit more… I dunno red pilled and biased towards Linux.
I daily Fedora for ALL my games pretty much, save for Metro Redux: Enhanced Edition and SteamVR titles. Games with anticheat that don’t work on Linux? I don’t play them anymore, if they don’t wanna play ball that’s fine.
The Linux installer is more friendly towards installing your thing on your system. Windows seems to lack many things and don’t even give you choice except for the install location.
But I wonder, if a stupid Windows forward installer is “user friendlier” than a Linux mint installer or Fedora one. I found the partition thing always confusing but on Linux you get automated and fluidly explained what you can do.
It can be, depends if you need proprietary software on a regular basis.
Or if you install one of the distros that have sane defaults for laymen.
Something like popOS is definitely more user friendly for regular use, it just has the usual limitations with ( insert random windows only software ), but that is another problem entirely.
That is not the case. Default builds of Windows 10 & 11 can send annoying notifications like “Scanned your computer blah blah…”. And I assume there are lot more. I mean if it isn’t popup, then what it is? I mostly disable notifications completely by the way. Probably there are more than that, idk.
Ah windows notifications. Ya most OS have that even Linux. With that said it takes about 2 seconds to completely disable them and you never have to deal with it again.
Calling windows unusable because of a tiny window appearing on the bottom right corner is just being dramatic.
It’s hard for people to accept your point when you’re being over the top dramatic about a feature that is easily disabled.
Calling windows unusable because of a tiny window appearing on the bottom right corner is just being dramatic.
Do you really think just because of that? You guys are dramatizing a lot than me. I just say that is annoying, defaults are not fine. Tweaking it consumes my time a lot. Don’t miss the whole point. It’s just a tiny tiny little bit example of how awful and annoying defaults are.
I haven’t found any info about Tiny10 being compromised
LTSC will depend on your usage
if you rely on lots of Microsoft services then you’d be better with stock Windows
I agree! Microsoft services fits nice with stock. But still doesn’t change stock is bad. But most of my friends and relatives (who use Windows) doesn’t use Microsoft products (except core products like calculator) because they do not need it. The stock just comes with so many bloat, bad taskbar, telemetries etc… Some of them don’t know how to debloat and tinker with system so they can’t mess with it and leave it at stock, some of them knows and does every single step to go far away from stock.
Tiny10 compromise was a hearsay then. Thanks for your info.
I didn’t understand what you mean by LTSC will depend on your usage. Can you explain it more?
These “Windows bad” posts are the worst thing in the Linux community. I run Windows on my desktop because Games are just far easier and usually run better, and Windows works perfectly fine.
ProtonDB is the first place I go before buying a game, most of the time games work, but there’s a few occasions where I have to change some configurations.
That article doesn’t mention Wayland and I don’t have Nvidia card myself. So, can I go now and suggest Nvidia owners to use Wayland if their Mesa, Vulkan and Nouveau are up to date?
I actually came to this community to actually ask about the state of Wayland on NVIDIA lol. I have a laptop that has hybrid AMD/NVIDIA graphics and I want to FULLY switch to Wayland but it NEEDS to be stable enough to not cause issues while I’m working.
I have a 1060 and use proprietary drivers. On sway I sometimes have smal graphics glitches that go away when I hover them with my mouse. On Hyprland with the nvidia build I have experienced no problems.
I’m on a laptop with hybrid Nvidia/Intel graphics, and Wayland has been working fine for me. I typically run in “on-demand” mode, but I’ve used both strictly Intel and strictly Nvidia modes as well, and it’s been fine.
I think the only real issue I’ve had is that Splitgate refuses to launch in Wayland, so I switch to X if I want to play - general computing works fine, native apps have had no issues, and all the other games I’ve played have launched without issue.
The Nvidia GPU is a 1650 TI, and I’m on the Nvidia 535 driver.
I have used Wayland on NVIDIA for couple of years now. It’s not perfect, but generally it’s usable and I haven’t used X11 after I switched. My current issues are probably more from applications not supporting Wayland, because XWayland can cause some annoyances when using programs through it.
Probably not yet as the gsp firmware loading that would allow full performance is not included in these patches and these patches will requires linux 6.6 to work at all while 6.4 is the current release.
Even if the users were using a kernel tree that isn’t even in Linus’ tree yet in addition to bleeding-edge Mesa, you still shouldn’t be using nor recommending this.
From the article:
It will take a long time before we get the bugs worked out and get a full feature set with reasonable performance.
We are not, however, yet to the point where you can run an arbitrary app and expect it to work properly.
However, right now there are enough missing features and known issues that a lot of apps won’t work and we already know that. Please don’t file “XYZ game doesn’t play” issues just yet.
This is a large step forward but nowhere near usable for the wider Linux gamer audience yet and that’s just the Vulkan driver.
Other parts of Nouveau aren’t too great either and there is still no re-clocking support. Your iGPU is likely faster than any card with NVK right now.
Meanwhile, I invested a solid 30hrs over 2 weeks of troubleshooting, researching, and getting help from users in order to have 4k120 on Fedora, something that supposedly works for my configuration. And no worky.
I really really wanted 2023 to be the year I finally migrated, but basic functionality being inexplicably broken just isn’t it.
NVIDIA? My condolences, good news though is that open-source NVIDIA drivers will be coming over the years (NVK and the open-source kernel packages), so expect it to get better.
I’ve never understood the issues people have with Nvidia on Linux.
I’ve got a 3080, powering 3 monitors, using EdeavourOS, running the closed-source drivers. Genuinely zero issues so far, and yet everytime I mention it I get a bunch of alleged know-it-alls telling me how terrible my experience should be lol.
If you get a good experience doesn’t mean it will be a good experience for everyone. It’s not as bad as it was some time ago but it’s not all cotton candy. (I use a 1060 on Linux btw)
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