It's been more than a year since I started using openSUSE Tumbleweed. I used Ubuntu around 2019 (casually). I tried to play a couple of games through Wine back then, it didn't work and later, it wouldn't even boot. Note that I didn't mess with anything, it just randomly stopped working.

Around 2022 I used Fedora and I messed something up during some CLI stuff so bad I just broke it, and it didn't boot on the next boot. Again, back to Windows since it had everything I needed and I didn't really have a major reason to switch to anything else.

As Windows started getting more annoying with basically everything they do (it only got worse since then hahahaha), I decided to ditch it and thought of using a Linux distro instead.

Now, I didn't consider returning to Ubuntu and Fedora as I had a bad experience (Fedora would've been great too for me at this point since I probably would've figured out what went wrong). So I did a lil research on what operating systems don't suck and just work, and then I got to know about openSUSE. I didn't even know this chameleon's existence until I came across a Reddit post, and then I chose Tumbleweed.

Now this time with Linux and an operating system in general, it was and still is a great experience. I usually use my desktop for either programming some stuff, playing RDR2, or general browsing. These are the only reasons why I use my desktop mostly and Tumbleweed nails everything, everything works as it's supposed to (in most cases). I messed up the file system table once which I fixed myself with a lil research, so that's on me and isn't an issue with SUSE.

I didn't do any ricing yet since I need absolutely nothing on the screen except the software I'm working with. I have a small panel on the bottom right which shows current date and time along with media player. This auto-hides if any window is on the front, especially the full-screen ones. I have a shortcut to trigger it if I want to see the time.

I use activities in KDE a lot since switching between apps is much easier. I open different apps in different activities, so instead of switching apps, I just switch activities. It is just more convenient because I can configure shortcuts for these instead of going through all the apps to find what I am looking for.

It's fair to say that I got into the Linux environment, probably because of Tumbleweed. Also, using CLI isn't my thing as in most cases I use Android Studio or other IDEs, since that's the only main reason why I use my desktop besides gaming. Although nothing changed in the tools I use but in the context of exploring or playing around with stuff, I've been using CLI more than ever.

I've played RDR2 on both Windows and Tumbleweed. On Tumbleweed, gaming is excellent. I have spent more than 60 hours in-game, and it works perfectly fine.

openSUSE & Tumbleweed do great at:

Tumbleweed goes through testing with openQA before the snapshots are available to the public. During this phase, bugs and other issues can be caught and fixed accordingly. From the installation until now, it has never broken; it works as it did on the first boot after installation. I had absolutely not a single problem in this context, I can't even nitpick it. It works (in almost every case) and configures everything I would need and expect out of the box.

This is one of the "peak cinema" moments of openSUSE. I tried to do some things, like switching to Hyprland from KDE and messing with some stuff, but later thought I don't really need them. Now, I can just roll back to the state where these things never existed in the system. It's as simple as:

And within a couple of seconds, it's set, reboot and it will just work. If you broke it so bad that you can't even enter into TTY, you can directly boot into these snapshots via boot menu (GRUB).

While I never got a reason to ask anything myself, I've seen a couple of posts on the forum and Reddit where both users and developers (specifically u/bmwiedemann) are chill and explain as normal humans would. Well, most of them.

Search for the entire OBS instance of openSUSE in CLI. That's dope stuff. I manually add repositories and install with zypper itself, but this is definitely great if I don't want to go through the repos or find the software manually.

I wouldn't say Tumbleweed is the perfect thing out there, it has a couple of lows, well, mostly nitpicks:

I don't know what's with this, it doesn't even detect my external microphone. I've gone through everything that I could find on the internet. The same microphone worked completely fine on Windows, on Tumbleweed it just doesn't, so I had to build a little app called

which is a minimal Android app to stream microphone input to the local network. I don't even care about this issue anymore since it doesn't really bother me, but this exists (maybe only on my computer because I've seen this getting fixed for others).

This is definitely a nitpick. This might not be a

for everyone, and I'm sure some people do prefer this by default.

firewall-cmd

has been great for me to deal with this but allowing connections for certain ports manually is a headache sometimes because I totally forget this is even a thing and go "oh guess what, now I have to allow the connections on that port". The fact that the site used to say "The makers' choice for sysadmins, developers and desktop users.", I guess that's fair.

Now, as someone who grew up using Windows and kept using it until I was around 19, I never thought I would need to manually add codecs just to watch a video, since VLC comes pre-installed. I get that the official distribution strictly allows only open-source stuff, which is definitely good, but I still kind of expect it to play the damn video by default, and the same goes for exporting an edit from Kdenlive. Again, this is a nitpick.

Ironically, this can be easily fixed via OPI (which doesn't come pre-installed) or manually add the repository that has codecs and pull it from that through zypper (that's exactly what OPI does behind the scenes for you).