I have been using Mint for about six months now and while I am not going to start distro hopping, I slowly want to start exploring the rest of Linux.
Originally I was looking at Arch based distros such as Manjaro and EndeavourOS, during which I found out Manjaro is somewhat pointless because you pretty much should not use the AUR on Manjaro or else you will break the system inevitably. EndeavourOS looked solid though.
However, I got a few suggestions regarding OpenSuSE Tumbleweed as a better alternative to Arch based distros and just wanted to know what are the pros and cons of OpenSuSE compared to Arch based distros from your experience?
I’m interested in hearing about this from others, too. I’m in the middle of finding the next distro for my work now that centos 7 is reaching EoL. OpenSuSE is looking appealing (maybe because it’s completely new to me), using leap of course, but I’ve setup tumbleweed in WSL and am planning to set it up to dual boot and use it as my primary OS. Based on what I know, it wouldn’t be “better” than Arch, just a different way of managing updates. Tumbleweed is all automated for packaging and preparing updates, so the same issues that happen with AUR could also creep in to tumbleweed (I assume). One of the prices to pay for bleeding edge rolling releases
I’m looking at switching the server base to OpenSuse Leap for the in-place upgrades. This is after over a decade of running RHEL clones.
I don’t have dependencies on anything RHEL specific, so the switch isn’t too bad.
The hardest part is FreeIPA which still isn’t in the repos, but that can live on CentOS since it’s easy enough to to setup a replica.
One thing I’ve found I dislike is how limited the installer is in partitioning disks. I like having multiple disks in my servers, and I can’t set them up in btrfs at install time like I want to.
Yeah, 3rd-party repos messing things up is a generic distro problem. Some repos are better about not conflicting then others. I’m planning on being pretty conservative with them when I finally switch a desktop to Tumbleweed.
