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 not sure if 1 year of using Tumbleweed makes me a long time user, but here goes.
From my prior multiple years of experience with Manjaro and EndeavourOS, I must say that nothing beats the AUR. I sometimes run into softwares that are not on the openSUSE repos. If this happens, I try looking it on Flatpak. If it’s not available on Flatpak either I go search for the version that kind people have packaged for openSUSE. These 3rd party repos are kind of like PPAs on Debian(-based distros). If still no, I try looking for the .rpm made for Fedora or the AppImage version provided on the software’s sites, but this solution is less than ideal since it does not update automatically and the .rpms sometimes do not work. That is the main con of openSUSE. Other than that, I would say that there are no more major advantages or disadvantages to using openSUSE over Arch-based ones. A minor advantage is that things feel more polished on openSUSE.
I hope this was not too intimidating. Softwares available neither on the openSUSE repos, on Flatpak, on 3rd party repos, in RPMs, or in AppImages are rare. Still, openSUSE Tumbleweed remains my favorite distro and I urge you to give it a try.
Edit: I forgot another major thing about openSUSE. It uses BTRFS by default, and handles system backups for you. Fortunately, I haven’t needed to use this yet, but it is a really nice feature.
Look into Distrobox. It allows me to use just about any AUR package via a local Arch container on my Tumbleweed system. You can even export apps and binaries to your local path and applications so that they integrate natively with the base system. I’ve only run into a handful of packages that didn’t work correctly, but I wasn’t surprised at all - they were all pretty low level system packages.
Wow, our admin uses Tumbleweed too? Cool. I’ll look into distrobox next time I want to install something not readily available on openSUSE. Thanks!