Hi, I would like to ask if openSuse Tumbleweed is a good option for daily driving ang gaming. I’m not new to Linux and have tried Linux Mint and Ubuntu. I can also troubleshoot problems on my own if anything comes up. The graphics card I have is Nvidia if its any relevant.
Yeah, it’ll be perfectly fine. You’ll probably want to stick to the Steam flatpak for gaming (personal preference), but it shouldn’t be much different than Ubuntu experience. Nvidia set up is usually the most annoying part, but that’s less the fault of the distro and entirely of Nvidia.
Thanks! I’ll keep in mind the Steam flatpak thing.
but maybe i’m biased
@Zeus
@ActualShark
Agreed, the one issue I had with steam (trying to get ALVR to work over a year ago) only happened with the flatpak version
I would like to ask if openSuse Tumbleweed is a good option for daily driving ang gaming.
Definitely! Depending on your hardware configuration and the games you play, it might even give you a significant performance boost. For completeness’ sake, it’s important to note that most of the (potential) gains in performance are related to having a more recently released kernel. So similar gains would have been had simply by using something like Arch or Fedora. Furthermore, other factors -like scheduler, custom kernel patches for additional performance and how the packages have been compiled etc- are perhaps also avenues worth exploring in that regard. However that’s a potential can of worms I would rather keep closed in this discussion.
Furthermore, openSUSE Tumbleweed comes with great defaults, which is in clear contrast to Arch that comes with (little to) no defaults. This makes it significantly easier to just install and get on with business, something which you might be already familiar with if you’ve used Linux Mint and Ubuntu. However, compared to those, openSUSE Tumbleweed might require you to perform some additional steps related to codecs and whatnot. This is nothing out of the ordinary as Fedora would have required it as well. Out of ‘the big bois’, only Ubuntu has been able to solve this through a single-click during installation. Note; this is not a technical matter but a legal one. Thankfully, openSUSE offers great documentation to solve this as smoothly as possible.
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that openSUSE Tumbleweed, contrary to all the other distros that have been mentioned, is configured with Snapper+Btrfs out of the box. This is IMO a must-have on any reliable system as it allows one to rollback to a working system whenever your system seems to have been borked somehow. The other distros allow you to set this (or similar solutions) up yourself, however openSUSE is the only one that does this for you. Furthermore, if security is of any concern to you, but you’re not that knowledgeable on the subject, thus requiring your distro to do the heavy-lifting, then once again openSUSE Tumbleweed (together with Fedora) performs best out of ‘the big bois’.
After mentioning such praise one might ask “What’s the catch?”, because -somehow- openSUSE Tumbleweed isn’t as represented in the online discourse compared to Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. And honestly, I don’t know why it is so criminally underrated. So in that regard, it’s quite unfortunate that it can’t quite reap the benefits of having a huge involved community like the others have. And perhaps that’s where the catch is…; it doesn’t have as big of a user base -> limited user base isn’t able to contribute to it so that it becomes as ‘competitive’ as the more popular distros -> potential new users don’t pick or stick to openSUSE because package/function X (or whatever) is absent -> it doesn’t have as big of a user base… To give an example; I really like to have a secure system. And while openSUSE is one of the best to offer that out of the box, it unfortunately doesn’t allow me to further harden it by installing a hardened kernel without myself becoming the maintainer of said package. This is in clear contrast to Arch, Debian and Fedora that offer access to repos that contain a hardened kernel; be it through the AUR, COPR or the repo maintained by the folks over at Kicksecure.
The graphics card I have is Nvidia if its any relevant.
Perhaps openSUSE Tumbleweed will require you to put in more effort -compared to Ubuntu- to make sure this works as intended. However, thankfully, the documentation has got you covered.
Thanks for the detailed reply! The limited userbase is definitely something to think about. Thankfully, I like reading documentaion and it’s nice to know openSUSE has that!
Thanks for the detailed reply!
Thank you for being appreciative!
Though, I couldn’t help but wonder the motivation behind your inquiry. Are you just exploring the waters beyond Ubuntu? Are you interested in rolling release and got curious when you learned what openSUSE Tumbleweed had to offer in that space? Were you perhaps looking for a distro well-suited for gaming and did you perhaps come across someone mentioning openSUSE Tumbleweed which subsequently peaked your interest? Are you perhaps unhappy for some reason with Ubuntu and looking for something to replace it with?
Lots of questions, of which I don’t expect you to answer more than a couple (if at all). I would already be more than happy if you could provide us a bit more insight regarding the motivation behind your inquiry.
Oh no worries. I’ll try to answer what I can.
I’m currently daily driving Windows due to uni but once that’s done I want to fully switch to Linux. I’m just starting to spread my wings outside of Ubuntu right and see what’s out there. Heard of openSUSE Tumbleweed from websites and youtube and thought “Hey why not give it a shot”. The UI looks real neat as well. I’m not really looking for a gaming focused distro right now. Just something that I can daily drive and occasionally play games with.
One more point that you shouldn’t let scare you away, but just something nice to know going into OpenSUSE: by default, the distro is FOSS only, the official software repositories don’t have things like proprietary multimedia codecs or other non-free (as in free speech) software included. You have to enable these yourself if you want them (to, say, watch MP4 files perhaps).
This has gotten so dead simple recently that it can be done in a couple of terminal commands, it’s just important to mention. If you know it going in, it saves the step of “what the heck, why aren’t my media files playing??”
sudo zypper install opiopi codecsOPI is a package manager for installing software from a few sources, namely the openSUSE Build Service (which is where OPI gets its name, OBS Package Iinstaller), Microsoft, the Packman repositories, and a few others. Installing codecs is the only thing I have ever used it for, though.
EDIT: zipper to zypper
Just a nitpick; its zypper not zipper.
You know, I was talking about actual zippers in another thread at around the same time I was writing this, and my brain just went with it. Doesn’t help that I have aliases for all my regular zypper commands and haven’t actually typed it out in awhile. 😅
😂
Thank you!
I’m just starting to spread my wings outside of Ubuntu right and see what’s out there.
As you must have been aware of by now; there are hundreds of distros out there. Which obviously makes it a daunting task to find your distro with that overwhelming amount of distros to potentially choose from. However, quite fortunately, the vast majority is actually not even worth considering as a daily driver. Arguably only the popular independent distros (Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Slackware and Ubuntu[1] etc[2]) are noteworthy, unless you’ve got very specific wants and/or needs that are only easily accessible through a derivative of theirs. Out of these, Gentoo is perhaps too much of a deep dive at this point in your Linux journey. Slackware ain’t bad, but as you’ve already had some experience with modern Linux distros, I find it rather unlikely that you would enjoy using it; though, perhaps, you might one day (read: decades down the line). So…, only five distros remain… On that note, for whatever it’s worth, openSUSE Tumbleweed definitely stands out positively among these IMO (though perhaps another one might be shining even brighter (obviously biased 😜)).
The UI looks real neat as well.
Interesting. Are you referring to the desktop environment? Which -actually- should be reproducible on most other distros*. Or perhaps you’re actually referring to YaST? Which is openSUSE’s excellent configuration tool; perhaps closest thing that Linux has to Windows’ Control Panel. Some even regard it as openSUSE’s killer-feature, especially because most other distros (aside from MX Linux) only come with relatively basic configuration tools by comparison. In retrospect, I probably should have mentioned it in my earlier comment 😅.
I’m not really looking for a gaming focused distro right now.
I’m actually glad you aren’t; they generally tend to miss out on polish. If you do end up looking into one, then I’d argue it’s better to run a dedicated distro as such -perhaps as a dual boot- for all your gaming needs instead of trying to game heavily on your daily driver, unless you find that too cumbersome and/or fear for issues related to storage. I’m aware that this is probably an unpopular take*.
Just something that I can daily drive and occasionally play games with.
Aight, got ya. Well, in that case, openSUSE Tumbleweed is definitely worth considering.
- I am very aware that Ubuntu is technically not quite as independent as the others are.
- I felt the likes of Alpine, Guix, NixOS, Puppy, Solus and Void are at least worth mentioning as independent distros.
I use Tumbleweed for this exact purpose, and I love every second of it! It’s been my choice distro for a while now, and put a definitive end to my distro hopping. I can’t speak to how using Nvidia with it will work as I’ve always run AMD, but Steam runs beautifully!
I’m glad your loving it! It looks like a beautiful distro. Hopefully it ends my distro hopping too!
I’ve got mad respect for SUSE. They’ve always played fair with open source. But I found Arch to be ideal for gaming. I may get down voted but Arch plays all my Steam games excellently. Granted I haven’t tried openSUSE out for that kind of thing. My last two remaining client from my business, a doctor and an attorney, I have using openSUSE on their laptops and desktops. They use SUSE Linux Enterprise on the server. It’s fucking bulletproof. The Maytag of Linux. I’m thinking about killing my free Alma Linux Oracle VM and putting SLES or openSUSE in its place. I like the direction SUSE is headed.
Well, I don’t know how fair they play now, but for sure that wasn’t always the case.
Arch btw
I have used Tumbleweed prior as a daily driver with an Nvidia 1050ti. From memory, you will have to enable a repo, and that’s about it. openSUSE also has YaST which will help significantly with managing this sort of stuff for your install. The gaming experience on openSUSE was pretty much issueless for me.
I just set up Tumbleweed recently with a similar card and can confirm that all you have to do is enable the repo.
Awesome, thanks for the confirmation!
Same experience with two machines equipped with a 1070 and a 2080. Both work without issues under Tumbleweed (with Intel and AMD processors, to spice things up a bit).
Hey we have the same GPU. Good to know it works well
Tumbleweed is rolling release so just make sure you snapshot your system once before an update and once after just Incase something goes wrong
Opensuse already does this by default.
Opensuse is a amazing roller release as it is rock solid and stable.
Oh yeah that’s right. I totally forgot ooensuse does that 😆 been a long time since I’ve used it.
I’m on Arch myself. Been a Linux user for 15 years I love it
Thanks for reminding me
I have used linux in the server era for around 8 years noe. On the desktop for about 5. I did use arch before i settled on opensuse.
That’s awesome! Enjoy
Tumbleweed is fine for gaming. I daily drive it for three years now and cant complain much.
Just as a note, if you cant connect to external devices check the firewall first, you might need to open ports. YaST has a module for that, no need for Terminal foo.
Dont go and use too many OBS Repos (via opi), it is possible to run into conflicts sooner than later.
If you cant find your desired software check flatpak or appimage, distrobox is another option.
I prefer Fedora but OpenSUSE is a great distro too, rolling releases just tend to need a little more troubleshooting and I really like the middleground.
I switched, after years of running Mint, to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as a daily driver. It’s very good and I’d recommend trying it. I like the way it’s kept so up to date but very seldom has problems, and if an update introduces an issue it’s easy to roll back.
You should be aware that the standard way to update Tumbleweed is “sudo zypper dup” and not whatever the GUI offers. Also you will need to enable one extra repository to get additional codecs.
Also note that you may occasionally need “sudo zypper dup --allow-vendor-change” to resolve dependency issues when package A depends on a version of package B that is only available in a different repository from the one from which you have previously installed B.
The only other thing I’ve found is that the Discover app will show you some packages as being available only in Flatpak form, and those don’t get updated through the usual zypper process (I think). So you need to do “flatpak update” to get those updates.
Flatpaks can be a challenge to get working with each other (since they don’t have access to all system resources) so it can be helpful to install flatseal to tweak them. But also some packages that Discover will offer as Flatpak only are actually available in RPM format if you search around (and sometimes enable a third party repository), and RPMs can be easier to get working with other software (though Flatpak’s sandboxing is a good thing). The site software.opensuse.org is one place you can consult.
You can also install Snaps when you can’t find an appropriate RPM or Flatpak.
Steam runs without problems on my machine and I can play many games.
Look up the process for rolling back to a btrfs snapshot using snapper, because it is reassuring to have this as an emergency recovery measure.
I’m not using NVIDIA but from what I’ve read most people don’t find it to be a problem.
Some may say arch, due to.bleeding edge nature for drivers and stuff
Pop os and have out of the box nvidia support
Well opensuse only ships open source driver and that can be an issue with some nivida cards. That said you can install you own drivers
There’s a semi official repository that’s there just for that which everyone enables just after installation (it’s even a preset in Yast). So it’s not an issue at all. You can use all the standard stuff without any problems.
Ye, I used it once and didn’t like it cause it was green by default. I was still in middle school. Anyways I’ve only heard good things from opensuse
I dont know anything of Linux Gaming because nothing works, on my GPU, or whatever, somehow it doesnt work this is probably a WINE thing.
So Proton and all are sometimes working less well as Flatpak, which would stand against Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite and so on. OpenSuse doesnt care about KDE so microOS KDE will always be buggy it seems.
I use Kinoite and will probably never switch. Its pretty great, up to date, secure, with rollback…
I don’t mean to be a jerk, but this has nothing to do with what OP asked. You’re talking about all immutable systems, and OP isn’t asking about those.
Also, I feel like I need to defend OoenSuse here a little. Their KDE support on Tumbleweed is excellent, and has a long track record of being good. The brand-new OpenSuse Kalpa - the Plasma desktop they’re building from MicroOS - is a brand new project that’s in beta.
Kinoite is great, I’m sure. But it’s not what this thread is about.
Yeah totally right. I just heard from some probably biased people that Kalpa would never exit beta and their main focus was only on GNOME.
Which is not about Gaming. So yeah still, I guess if you have all the unfree packages native apps may run better than Flatpaks
Using nvidia with Arch is super simple. Just select the nvidia proprietary drivers during installation (archinstall), and it’s done. It is great for gaming, steam is available in the multilib repository (enable it during the installation with archinstall). It is pretty much ready to go after the installation. You might have heard that it is super hard to install, but that is if you install it manually (without archinstall). Haven’t tried suse myself, so I can’t talk about it, but I can definitely recommend Arch, not only for gaming but for daily driving as well. Having the AUR spared me the headaches I had back when I used mint and fedora, and programs weren’t available in the distro repository.
