OpenSUSE. Much like CentOS or Fedora, it is the free and open sourced version of an enterprise Linux distro. In the case of OpenSUSE, it is based off of SUSE enterprise Linux. After playing around with it some, I have even switched to it from Void Linux. I am going to go over the reasons that you might want to use OpenSUSE, including the Software management, Yast, the different release models, installation, and snapshots.
I tried it and wanted to like it but it wasn’t for me. I came from Debian/KDE and moved to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/KDE. First thing I noticed was that FreeCAD, which I used quite a bit over the holiday period for hobby projects, wasn’t working on Tumbleweed…
After a few tries of getting it to work, I went and installed Leap, where FreeCAD was working. I again wanted to like Leap, but KDE was so slow, that it was just a tad better than unusable. It was an old laptop, admittedly, however the difference in speed of the UI between Debian and OpenSUSE was remarkable. Eventually I got frustrated by the slowness and moved on again.
Yast is nice and all. I suppose the snapshots are a good feature as well, however if your data is properly separated from your system, and you use some form of documentation/ansible for the system side of things, I’m not sure if it would be needed often.
Since enabling compression (which isn’t on by default), I definitely noticed an improvement in general responsiveness. Should you ever want to give it another try, set it up during the install and you should be fine.
Can you provide more details on what wasn’t working, so I can improve the package?
The FreeCAD package in openSUSE recently switched from to QtWebKit to QtWebEngine, may have caused some issues.
This was a few months ago, earlier this year. The freecad package wasn’t available in tumbleweed. I think there was some version conflict of a package.
The UI response issues were more with KDE in general, not with FreeCAD.
I tried it and wanted to like it but it wasn’t for me. I came from Debian/KDE and moved to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/KDE. First thing I noticed was that FreeCAD, which I used quite a bit over the holiday period for hobby projects, wasn’t working on Tumbleweed…
After a few tries of getting it to work, I went and installed Leap, where FreeCAD was working. I again wanted to like Leap, but KDE was so slow, that it was just a tad better than unusable. It was an old laptop, admittedly, however the difference in speed of the UI between Debian and OpenSUSE was remarkable. Eventually I got frustrated by the slowness and moved on again.
Yast is nice and all. I suppose the snapshots are a good feature as well, however if your data is properly separated from your system, and you use some form of documentation/ansible for the system side of things, I’m not sure if it would be needed often.
Since enabling compression (which isn’t on by default), I definitely noticed an improvement in general responsiveness. Should you ever want to give it another try, set it up during the install and you should be fine.
Thanks, that’s a good tip. Might try it on another machine
Can you provide more details on what wasn’t working, so I can improve the package? The FreeCAD package in openSUSE recently switched from to QtWebKit to QtWebEngine, may have caused some issues.
This was a few months ago, earlier this year. The freecad package wasn’t available in tumbleweed. I think there was some version conflict of a package.
The UI response issues were more with KDE in general, not with FreeCAD.