First, let me be clear up front that I’m not promoting the idea that there should be one “universal” Linux distro. With all the various distros out there for consumers, there’s lots of discussion about Arch, Debian, and Fedora (and their various descendant projects), but I rarely see much talk about openSUSE.
Why might somebody choose that one over the others? What features or vision distinguishes it from the others?
Edit: I love all the answers! Great stuff. Thanks to everyone!
There are a bunch of software-related reasons why openSUSE is a good choice (snapper, zypper, yast, to name a few), although few are exclusive to openSUSE. I think the primary selling point of openSUSE (Tumbleweed) is that it is a rolling release distro that never crashes, never requires attention, and just works. One of the reasons people don’t talk about it is probably that it is boring. All packages are tested extensively. It never breaks. And even if it did break, the default btrfs file system and snapper ensure that the system doesn’t stay broken for longer than it takes to reboot.
If you want a distro that is up to date, easy to use, and dependable, openSUSE is a fantastic choice. It’s just not very exciting to have something that never requires attention; a lot of people use Linux because they like things requiring attention.
As an afterthought, I also think the fact that openSUSE and its users seem to be pathologically unable to create any logo or symbol for anything even tangentially related to the distribution that doesn’t look like absolute shit might be holding them back.
The curse of competency. The stuff people mostly talk about is the stuff people are complaining about.
I don’t remember who said it, but a writer once commented that the reason there’s so much conflict at the center of novel plots is because nobody wants to read a book about old Mrs Harrington, who lives a quiet, happy, commented life, spending her days working in her garden. Because it’s boring.
I think it’s mostly because a lot of users here are quite new. After a few years, you just want to do things with your system, not to it.
Back in the 90s I was all for breaking stuff and installing weird shit all the time (distributions were also much more rustic at the time). Nowadays, the less I notice my system, the better.
(So I run Tumbleweed)
I just got it tumbleweed is a rolling release because tumbleweeds roll in the wind.
And they said Germans couldn’t make fun jokes?
That’s exactly why I am on Tumbleweed as well.
I am not German myself, but most of my colleagues are. Having gotten to know the German attitude towards technology, I feel I understand why life with openSUSE is as uneventful as it is. How anyone got them to adopt something as subversively radical as a rolling release model is something of a mystery to me, but I won’t complain.
As shallow as it might seem, good branding is really important, since it has the power to instantly convey vision or commitment to a project.
But to your point about low-maintenance distros, I wonder how the immutable landscape will look in the next five years!
Not true. Fedora and others use BTRFS too and just dont deal with snapshots at all.
I dont care about traditional Fedora but that is pretty bad. TW is way better here.
Thanks for this clarification. I didn’t consider that someone might run btrfs without snapshots, but I suppose that might even be quite common. I don’t get out much.
I still find it quite baffling that for a distro that pitches itself as an everyday Linux distro for newer and intermediate users, Fedora doesn’t come with snapshots preconfigured out of the box or any obvious way to handling system restore.
Yes traditional Fedora is useless in that regard. Their offline updates also dont really work reliably.
Rpm-ostree (“Fedora Atomic Desktops”) Fedora meanwhile is really really nice.