I always was and will be team SUSE, no matter what. With other distros I had bad experiences at some point. Never with SLES or OpenSUSE. Although, currently I have no OpenSUSE installation, as it is not suitable for gaming.
Oh, as with any Linux, all of them are for everything suitable if you have the time to modify everything. I‘d rather use a Linux which is optimized for gaming, e.g. uses Zen kernel, ProtonPlus, Steam with gamescope and gamemode, HDR enabled by default due to the correct DisplayPort drivers, and many other things.
In terms of frames per second, it is probably only slightly better than an unoptimized OpenSUSE
Zen Kernel is the opposite of “optimized for gaming”.
It was once the default kernel for out-of-the-box gaming simply because it had fsync patches integrated. But since fsync is in the normal kernel for quite some time now zen is obsolete for that purpose.
I mean it’s still an okay choice for any desktop environment but it is definitely not optimized for gaming as it sacrifices throughput and is more tailored to multitasking of a lot of smaller things running to provide a snappy desktop experience.
I’ll concede that the logo is good but I found the package manager confusing. Also I like compiling packages from source so only a couple of distros allow me to fully dive into that. It’s Gentoo for me, I’m afraid.
I’m pretty sure that you’ve already checked, but the obvious things sometimes fly under the radar and go unnoticed: is the phone in file transfer mode in the first place? Other one (which has bitten me) is if you’re using an usb-hub, try direct connection and/or different ports on the host computer.
Personally I’ve spent far too long to try and hunt down something obscure while the fix was really simple as some default option changed with updates or whatever. And in general I’ve forgotten to check the simple things first way too many times and that has caused wasted hours way more than I want to count or admit.
I think the issue with Suse is a lack of clear vision - SLE exists and it’s very good to have a competitor to Red Hat in my opinion. OpenSuse is a bit of everything: there’s Tumbleweed which’s selling point is to be rolling release and fulfilled the role Sid has for Debian: be the basis for the stable distribution. However, the stable distribution which was rebranded to Leap is now based on SLE (and will be based on ALP with version 16 if everything works out). So Tumbleweed is just rolling along as a downstream of Factory, which is… another rolling distribution serving as the main development distribution.
Then there’s also Micro OS, another rolling release distribution designed to host containers. Personally, I’d have found a minimal OS designed to be run in a VM - something similar to Alpine - more useful, but I’m not really a container guy. It’s also supposed to switch to ALP if I’m not mistaken.
Oh yeah and there’s also OpenEuler which is a free RHEL clone.
I wonder if all of this makes sense in some enterprise setups?
And then, last time I tried Tumbleweed (in fairness this was some years ago), after all this work with distributions tailored to specific cases, a build system with testing and so on, I run into a network configuration issue that couldn’t be solved with YaST. I didn’t know why they insist on keeping it, I guess at this point it’s such cost fallacy. Anyhow, try searching for how to solve it with Suse, answers are usually use YaST. Turns out Suse uses their own solution for networking, which is wicked (that’s not an adjective). This is started in 13.4.1.1 in doc.opensuse.org/…/cha-network.html. I don’t remember seeing the option in the terminal YaST. Zypper also wasn’t very convincing, coming from pacman.
All in all, from my point of view, they created a broad ecosystem that fills a lot of niches and yet just annoys me when I actually try to use it. In my opinion, their core tools are unremarkable at best.
YaST. I didn’t know why they insist on keeping it, I guess at this point it’s such cost fallacy.
What do you mean? I love the idea of a comprehensive central system config tool. I haven’t used OpenSuSE in ages but it always stood out to me as a huge plus.
It’s a nice idea when it works. But when it doesn’t cover your case, you need to edit configs manually and hope that YaST doesn’t decide to override them later. At least that’s what I remember.
Ah, I see, that’s unfortunate. That’s generally a real problem with tools that try to edit existing writable config files.
I really want to make a distro which is built on top of basically a GUI-first (at least for most general configuration) NixOS kinda thing, where you both have to go through the tool but it also doesn’t limit you in what you can do. That’s a huge endeavor though especially to get it right :^)
A good example of shitty YaST imo is the YaST sudo tool… Which doesn’t work unless you first manually edit the sudoer file to remove two lines that specifically says that they are default configurations and should be changed by the distro maintainers…
Tumbleweed does also feed into Leap. Leap uses SLE packages for most of the core libraries, but then user-facing applications see new versions integrated from what’s been packaged in Tumbleweed. Particularly, they also automate lots of the package testing in Tumbleweed, so that can be reused for Leap. Well, and also for SLE, which will also grab stuff from Tumbleweed when they do plan to upgrade their packages.
As for minimal VM images, they do offer downloads for those.
On this page, you can click on “Download”, then “Alternative Downloads”.
These don’t seem to be available for Leap currently. Not sure, if it’s because Leap 15.6 has only been out for a few weeks. Could also be that I’m missing something here.
As for Wicked, they only use it for server systems as the default, and they do make it easy to switch to NetworkManager, if you prefer.
From all the comments it looks like it’s quite a challenge to go native Linux.
One option, run a VM using KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine, native to some distros).
You can install Windows IOT LTSC (Long-term Servicing Channel), which receives only security updates 2x/year, no others. It also doesn’t have all the bloat. It’s what I run for daily use.
Win10 LTSC. It gets updates 2x/year, has very minimal bloat.
Pro gives you Group Policy, which is essential for controlling things any more (especially telemetry and automatic updates, for example).
And yea, gonna need some ram to run a VM. Linux may run OK on lesser amounts, but even a VM of Windows can get pretty hungry. It’ll run ok with 8 allocated to it, and it’ll slog along with less, but still run.
Cannot say anything about using it with a Yubikey.
Concerning Evolution: It never let me down, always worked and is comparatively lightweight.
Thunderbird was quite slow/heavy/memory hungry many years back. KMail ate my emails, failed at integration of GMail accounts etc etc etc. In the past I also liked Sylpheed, but AFAIK it doesn’t have any OAUTH support etc. by now.
When nothing big changes, I guess only Thunderbird and Evolution are good investments, because they seem to be the only clients which are stable now and have enough users/active developers to not disappear randomly.
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