OpenSuse Leap: Opinions? Experience?

I looked at it very briefly as pkgs.org seemed to suggest they had a pre-built binary for samba-ad-dc, but apparently it's a cut-down version that requires a completely different tool to manage, so I ended my line of inquiry there.

Suse is really common as a server OS in Germany, compared to RedHat elsewhere. Good support, stable, great KDE integration, YaST is really good too (been a standard of Suse for at least 20 years).

That being said, I thought they were discontinuing Leap in favor of Tumbleweed and their new-ish in-betweeen (not rolling/not super stable) version? They still are selling their server/support though. Tumbleweed as a desktop system is really good, however, I've found the mirrors are not the quickest and can take a long time to install updates when compared to Debian/Ubuntu based; Arch; or even when compared to other RPM based distros like Fedora/Redhat.

Yeah, I wouldn't wager much of anything that Rocky/Alma will be around in a few years (sadly).

If you've got the money to burn and want to stay in the RedHat-o-sphere, honestly, Oracle linux isn't terrible, especially if you have DB stuff. Their unbreakable kernel is really solid and they're not going anywhere. For as terrible and ripoffy as the company is, the linux distro is pretty decent. My company uses a mix of Oracle and Cent (moving to RH) in the US, and Suse in Europe and they don't seem to have too many issues.

Personally, I prefer to use Debian/Ubuntu servers at home and at a previous job, and have had no issues. Plenty of information for anything you need on the interwebs too.

There is a which distro thread. But maybe "which distro" threads are not a problem in this day and age.

I also looked at SuSE after the last kerfuffle. Like the other post above, I thought for a moment SuSE had a good Nextcloud package, but in the end I thought it didn't meet my expectations and dealing with SuSE was more annoying than I thought.

Frankly, I think Alma is moving in an interesting direction, and I think I'll keep my eye on what they do. They also have commercial backing which sounds good?

I know you are asking for past experiences, not guidance- but I'm a terrible person, and I would ask why you're looking at SuSE, what do you expect to get...

Well, I cannot offer much because I only looked at SuSE briefly in the last few months and decided against it, and my only argument "against" it is simply "why not Debian?"

just to wade in with some more Debian love. Got to say that its the lightest OS I've used recently. Have one doing DNS/Bind9 DHCP DDNS duties at the moment. Boots in seconds has everything I want. Everything else has eaten way too many pies as far as I am concerned. Rocky9 works well enough. Whether its going to be around till the 2030s though eh. Got to like the ambition.
Did try OpenSuse Leap 15.5 a few days ago. Didn't much like it. Slow to install, slow to boot, yeah think Debian kind of spoiled me a bit.

Debian 12 is so rock solid that I really don't see why people don't run it more.

The only time I ever ran SuSE was back in college when it was my first Linux and I was able to physically buy it in a box at Best Buy. It's always been a rather bloated distro.

One distro I used a hella lot back in the day was Slack. Anyone used that recently. I used to love slack and have to say have a massive soft spot for it. Dunno how viable a commercial/industrial product it is compared to the EL/Debian clones though.

Back in the day (c. 1998) I installed SuSE on my P75 while I was at Uni - like @drogin it was also my first experience of Linux. Everything was grindingly slow, but then that was computing generally in those days, certainly if you were on a student budget. I tried my best to like it but a need to actually get shit done (rather than tinker with Linux, bearing in mind that I was not studying computer science) meant that I had to revert back to Win95/98. At the time I remember the RPM package management being particularly painful, regularly getting stuck in dependency hell. I checked back in with it a few times over the next few years, but once I found Debian I have just stuck with that where I needed Linux. I think it speaks volumes that it was the distro that the TrueNAS folks chose to base 'Scale' on.

I recently tried SuSE Tumbleweed on my main PC just for laughs, but somehow it managed to make even my 12 core / 64GB RAM / all NVME monster, which normally flies through anything, feel "kinda laggy and slow" Yes, that IS a desktop only experience, but it would put me right off using it for anything else when Debian is right there.

waqar said:

One distro I used a hella lot back in the day was Slack. Anyone used that recently. I used to love slack and have to say have a massive soft spot for it.

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I mean, they made a new release in early 2022. The release notes include this little gem:

The Slackware pkgtools (package management utilities) saw quite a bit of development as well. File locking was implemented to prevent parallel installs or upgrades from colliding

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Very much hailing from a time when linux (and UNIX in general) would often hand the user / sysadmin a very sharp knife with the admonition "don't go cutting yourself!"

This impression is further re-inforced by these comments:

This has been an interesting development cycle (in the "may you live in interesting times" sense). Anyone who has followed Linux development over the years has seen the new technology and a slow but steady drift away from the more UNIX-like structure

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We switched from ConsoleKit2 to elogind, making it much easier to support software that targets that Other Init System and bringing us up-to-date with the XDG standards

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(emphasis mine)

So in answer to your question

Dunno how viable a commercial/industrial product it is compared to the EL/Debian clones though.

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I'm going with "not at all, old school linux enthusiasts only"

I generally use Debian for Linux boxes. My main NAS is running Ubuntu, for ease of ZFS integration, but now that I understand it better, I may move it back to Debian. I really don't like that snap garbage, and excising it from a new install is a big PITA.

Back in the day(late 90s/early 2000s), the dpkg format was wildly superior to rpm, but AFAIK pretty much every feature has been implemented for rpm now, so from an end-user standpoint, they're about the same. I believe dpkg may be a little easier to use for setting up your own packages, but that's mostly a guess, as I've never needed to actually learn the internals of either system. Rebuilding modified existing packages is about as far as I've gone, and the 'debuild' system is pretty nice.

If you want to boot off ZFS, I would recommend Proxmox, which is closer to Debian, but has a very nice installer and ZFS support is more integrated into the OS.

dnf/apt are very different even today, IMHO. apt/dpkg/deb still has more features which I think are either not present in dnf/rpm or not used; suggests/recommends, for example, and more metadata. But dnf has some usability advantages esp. for configuration management. For example, updating repositories is automatic by default and IMHO it's nicer. Also, it's complex, but debconf on the whole... I think it's a very mixed bag. It's great if you are configuring systems manually, but IMHO it interferes and makes automatic configuration management more complex.

Also, Debian packages and RHEL/Fedora packages take very different approaches; Debian is more prone to adding extra stuff on top (e.g. the Apache httpd configuration system it adds), while RHEL/Fedora packages tend to be more vanilla.

In use, although I see their packaging systems (and ecosystems) as very distinct, I think there are larger factors at play when deciding between either; ideological, related to support cycles, focus, etc. (and of course, there are other interesting distros to look at that offer wildly different things, most notably NixOS/Guix, for example).

steelghost said:

I'm going with "not at all, old school linux enthusiasts only"

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Yeah thought so. Might spin a vm up just laughs/memories. Might have a look at NixOS.Guix as well.

I use openSuse at home for all my linux installations. Sometimes translating installation instructions for applications on other distros is a PITA but I manage. My setup is using xfce for the desktop environment.

I run a range from a dedicated Plex server connected via NFS to OMV, docker setup for playing around (had a minecraft server for my kid), to general desktop stuff. All of it as VM's.

I run RHEL at work. I don't have SLES anywhere to really compare. Work is mostly focused on Linux at the server level with not really any sanctioned desktops. I find openSuse easy to work with and was a good choice for giving my kids before gaming was their thing.