The 2025 Linux Tier List

OpenSUSE is my favorite distro.

I first installed it after having an abysmal experience with Fedora (bad repos, unstable, etc.). It took me a while to really enjoy, but after figuring out how to update the system properly (it's zypper dup not zypper up), all my issues were quickly resolved.

OpenSUSE is extremely stable, has great repos (stable, large, up-to-date, good naming and dependency schemes, etc.), has a strong focus on security, provides appealing defaults (much better than fedora's), while remaining minimalist enough to have good performance and to be useful for someone like me who is going to extensively customize their system anyway.

I've tried bazzite but hated it, as it's difficult to customize, breaks very easily, and doesn't seem to have a notable performance improvement over something like Nobara (unfortunately fedora based, good otherwise if gaming is your main thing).

To somewhat answer your question: openSUSE Tumbleweed is the best "normal use-case" distro (in my opinion). It is, however, not super beginner friendly, has a smaller community and fewer docs, and isn't laser-focused on performance. It's good for someone who wants to settle down in their Linux experience, and find a daily driver for their most used device.

Other, more specialized options, you might find interesting:

• Nobara Linux: by far the best gaming distro, maintained by the glorious glorious eggroll (proton-ge creator). It breaks every once-and-a-while, but everything is always fixed within one update, at most a day apart, and the breaks are never disabling.
• Void Linux: uses runit instead of SystemD, meaning it's super, super fast. Has a great installer, is stable, and has good defaults, but absolutely a horrible choice for beginners, if you consider yourself such.

Again, openSUSE is absolutely fantastic, and my own daily driver — but I have Nobara installed on my gaming PC, and Void installed on my portable laptop. In the end, it's all a matter of use-case.

Edit: sorry for the insanely long response, my thoughts have been meandering today...

Even with the automated testing, Tumbleweed will still sometimes introduce problems with updates. They mitigate the risk of that with Snapper, so you can rollback to a previous state if things get borked.

Personally, though I've tried it a few times, I just can't get on with openSuse distros.

1. Updating is really slow since Zypper does one task at a time, compared to DNF or Apt which can download and install multiple packages at once
2. Updating is particularly slow in the US, since most opensuse servers are in the EU
3. Yast is powerful for enterprise/sysadmins, but is damn clunky to use for everyday normal stuff (IMHO).

I'd honestly just go for Fedora if you want up-to-date packages, perhaps Nobara if you want it more pre-setup for gaming and codecs. It's much more slick overall.

Is OpenSuse tumbleweed worth checking out? Something fairly stable and good for gaming

A rolling distro is not a stable distro

From a previous comment of mine:

After more than 15 years of Kubuntu I installed Tumbleweed a few years (two?) ago, because it offers a rolling release, system snapshots and KDE.

Having a job and a family, I do not have the time to tinker anymore, so I expect things to work smoothly out-of-the-box nowadays.

Tumbleweed let me down in this respect.

Once I had to completely reinstall the system because the snapshots filled the system partition during an update, which made it unable to start KDE. I could roll back from the terminal to the previous snapshot, but couldn't figure out how to remedy the problem, except for using a greater partition and reinstalling.

And just a few days ago KDE (and many applications, when used in LXDE) wouldn't start, because of version mismatches (caused by an incomplete update?) that broke the linkage of qt libraries. To resolve it I had to make a decision between two packages (tlp vs tuned) to finish the update, even though I hadn't installed those manually and didn't know anything about them.

Besides those problems I find the administration suboptimal, with the divide between the Interfaces of Yast and the KDE settings. I didn't manage to get my Brother network printer to work (except via direct USB connection), which worked out of the box with my android phone.

I plan to try the fedora atomic desktop soonish.

I don't think so, personally.

Their YaST system is pretty heavily integrated and unique only to distros based on SUSE.

Really it's just arch-based distros for rolling releases, and debian-based for point-released. The rest are superfluous.

or has the most packages of any distro

That's very much open to discussion. You can't just go by the number of packages because nixpkgs for example has multiple python versions as separate packages, each with a set of the same libraries just with a different prefix.

Rollbacks are definitely something worth talking about, but the package count is probably not.

Nixpkgs automatically generated packages from some language specific package managers, mainly Haskell and Node packages, which do hugely inflate the number. If you account for these, it does end up being smaller than the AUR. Plus, many of those automatically generated packages are frequently broken.

This still leaves Nixpkgs as the largest official repo, but I think any NixOS maintainer would agree that the average quality of a package in NixOS is not as high as something like an official Arch or Debian package. Package review processes are not nearly as intensive as they probably should be due to the lack of manpower to handle that..

Edit: To be clear, since my tone seemed very negative here, I am not just trying to spread negativity about NixOS. I've used NixOS for years and contributed to plenty of Nix projects in the time. It is without a doubt the best package manager atm and its ideas have had massive positive impacts on package management as a whole.