Surprised this hasn't been posted earlier: OpenSUSE, German Linux distribution

IMHO any Linux distribution will be a good change from Windows and Mac if you are trying to divest from US products.

Even if they are not european, they are open source.

The Linux Foundation might be based in California, but I still very much consider it to be Finnish. And Torvalds is, thankfully, very much on the anti-fascist side of the spectrum.
- Luckily the Linux Foundation stuff (having to obey US sanctions on Russian companies) affected those specific devs and not really users or anyone else.

A: I will always support SUSE, even if I don't use it myself.

B: Any Linux can be considered an international effort.

C: If you want to avoid American evil corp distros, skip RedHat (IBM) and Oracle. Maybe avoid Ubuntu and Pop!_OS too, but they are not in the same Evil Cyberpunk Megacorp level as IBM and Oracle.

Ubuntu is British though.

I mean sure, our government have been pretty dick to Europeans, but you aren't impacting the US by avoiding it.
- Ubuntu is South African. And Mark Shuttleworth is a tiny Elon from what I hear from people who either worked for him or applied to work at Canonical.
  
  I've been using either Ubuntu or Lubuntu for the past 15 years but planning on switching to Debian in the near future.
Don't forget Azure Linux. Yes, Microsoft has a Linux distro.

Linux Mint is technically an Irish based distro, as well.

I came here to ask just this, good to know

OpenSuse is such a mystery to me. In Debian, I know it's community run and there's a thousand developers all over the world and they vote and discuss everything. Ubuntu is corporate and that's easy to understand too. But OpenSuse? They say it's a community distro, but my (uneducated) feeling is that the community is like four Suse employees. Is there actually a community of developers? What is OpenSuse? If someone knows I'd like to know what it's like from the inside.

Here's a page from OpenSuse's website that links to some really interesting interviews with people who contribute to the project:

https://people.opensuse.org/index.html

Quote from interview with Ludwig:

Q: Three words to describe openSUSE? Or make up a proper slogan! A: Lots of fun!

Q: What do you think the future holds for openSUSE? A: The future is unwritten. As long as we have brilliant people we will see new ideas we haven’t thought about before.

Q: If you would have unlimited resources, what would you do with it? A: What kind of resources?

Q: Let’s say you have money to hire a thousand people to work on openSUSE. Who would you hire and what would you let them do? A: Finally fix RPM, printing and KDE? :-)

Q: Star Trek or Star Wars? A: Star Trek.

Q: Torvalds or Stallman? A: Pfft.
- Interesting, thank you. I started reading through and realized there are no newer interviews than 8 years ago. And two of the three most recent interviews are of Suse employees. This kind of reinforces my feeling to be honest.

SuSE was a blessing for me in the 1990s when you couldn't just download huge amount of data over the Internet. But I could walk into my local computer store and buy a 8 CD package with two big handbooks for 70 Deutschmarks.

Long story short: Without SuSE I might not be a software developer today, so I'm thankful even though I prefer other distros today. 🦎

In 2005 when I wanted to try out linux for the first time, the only distro that allowed for switching between KDE and Gnome was OpenSUSE. I learned quite a bit. I also learned I wasn't ready to switch over, there were many teething problems then, especially sound oriented ones. I kinda understood why people stuck with one or the other after that experience.

I'm a long-time OpenSuSE user, so I heartily recommend this! It leans more towards the professional side, so probably not for beginners, IMHO.

I wish I would’ve known that before I made it my permanent distro! It’s the first distro to actually get me to stop trying others and really buckle down and learn. I’ve learned a lot, but still consider myself very much a Linux noob!
- I mean, SuSE does have a lot of tools that simplify maintenance tasks, so may be it's not that bad for beginners. Honestly, I've used it for soo oops long (decades...) that I've just got used to the way things work. I'm conscious of that, though, so I don't recommend SuSE for beginners. I don't play games, so I really don't know if it's a good choice.

Been using it for a few months now and it's great. I haven't had any major problems with it. YAST is an awesome tool so I rarely had to use console commands to change/fix stuff. And filesystem snapshots are very well integrated so that one time I did fuck up and the system wouldn't boot (it was entirely my fault) it was very easy to roll back changes.

Yast and the snapshots are exactly what has kept me on it the most. Borked install after zypper dup? No problem! Rollback!

Not as comfortable with command line? Yast it is!

Still confusing sometimes, and sometimes how “locked down” it is makes my tasks a little harder, but solid and stable win at the end of the day!

Be aware that Suse, the parent company that donated the basis for opensuse to exist has asked them to change the branding and name for something that doesn't include Suse. So, keep your eyes peeled for that in the mid future.

currently daily-driving their Aeon flavour. it may be the best Linux-for-beginners i've ever seen. the installer has no options at all and just overwrites the disk with a preloaded partition which means installation takes literally five minutes. it's auto-updating, immutable, snapshots itself so it can roll back when something breaks, and basically only allows Flatpaks. on first boot you get an empty desktop with browser, app store, notes app, and calculator, and those are literally the only user applications on the machine. very refreshing.

That sounds really cool! Do you know if they include GPU drivers (NVDIA) or how you'd install them?
- i think it should. i'm running it on an amd laptop but one of the first things it did after installation was pop up a window that said "your system requires some drivers, we have installed them and they will be available next boot" and that made the camera, fingerprint reader and multitouch just start working.
  
  i've not tried it but apparently gaming "just works" after installing the steam flatpak.
So I can't install root on one drive and home on second drive? Does Aeon have Gnome or KDE? I somehow couldn't find it on their website, maybe I am blind.
- no, the partition scheme is predetermined because it's set up for snapshots.
  
  Aeon only has gnome, which i personally believe is a good choice because no matter your opinion on it, it provides a clean break from windows and mac which means new users won't assume that the system works a certain way because of how it looks.

Yeah ill be switching off of Fedora onto OpenSUSE as ive heard good things and Fedora is headed by Redhat, which is headed by IBM. I liked Fedora but its not anythung im super attached to so looking forward to learning OpenSUSE.

I have OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a laptop, and recently I encountered a number of annoying bugs, including one being unable to receive updates from the h264 repository, and Plasma 6 annoying bugs.

I definitely wouldn't recommend it anyone unless you like to tinker and fix your system.

Yeah, it's a shit show. I put up with it for like 2 years until the update to Plasma 6 utterly broke my system and finally decided to switch.
- What are you running now?
This only happened to me once but you just revert to the pre update snapshot in the boot menu and try again in a couple of weeks.

Love openSUSE! Been using tumbleweed with gnome for quite a bit and it's probably the best experience I have had with an operating system so far!

Tried Arch, Debian flavors, Nix, Fedora, and many of the other popular distros and they are all pretty darn good but the lizard Linux takes the cake for me! Highly recommend!

Currently using Fedora, what am I missing out on compared to suse?
- YAST. Personally, I think it's ass, but some people insist that it's OpenSUSE's killer software.
- For me it's specifically tumbleweed and it's great features. It's a rolling release distro so all the newest packages, easy to setup, utilizes a btrfs file system (Fedora does this also) for easy rollbacks if something does break. And despite it being a rolling distro I have yet to have something actually break.
  
  YAST can be nice sometimes as well but I tend to use terminal commands, however it's great for those who prefer a GUI, especially new folk.
  
  One con I will list is package availability. It's repositories are a bit smaller than most of the other major distros and sometimes flatpaks or directly downloading rpms are needed but it's fairly rare for me at least.
  
  So far my experience on it has been great for gaming, development, and just casual use. Highly recommend it to newbies and older Linux folks alike.

opensuse is awesome. you can choose your mirror here as well: https://mirrors.opensuse.org/

Love the wallpaper and logo!

I love opensuse if nothing else for the great mascot and the very talented artists who do their wallpapers, logos, and splashes. Also their open source font is what I daily drive on my machines! It is very nice!

Sadly they have a small team I think compared to other major distros. Their microOS team I think is just 2 or 3 people.

I have both Kalpa and bazzite and for me, bazzite just works better in almost every case and their encryption scheme and rollback method fits my needs better. But Kalpa is very usable if you don't game. Otherwise some hours of work getting steam flatpak working correctly.

I quite like that theme, what is it? It doesn’t look like the default Leap one.

I just installed OpenSUSE on both my work and personal machines, having been on Kubuntu for many years prior to that. I love it so far!

Kubuntu is also kind of European, because KDE e.V. is from Germany.
- The switch wasn't due to geopolitics, but yeah.
So using Kubuntu is bad now? I just switched from Windows to Kubuntu and am Quote happy with it.
- I switched because of snaps, which I had been ignoring for a while but they pissed me off enough to cause me to switch. If you're ok with snaps, then no problem.
- Using Kubuntu was always bad, friend. No politics about it, it's just shit. The worst KDE implementation.

Having worked on UnitedLinux, I'm okay if I never touch SuSE again. There are so many other options out there, still, that I can have the better distro format and still avoid SuSE. Yay!

I thought it was swiss, huh

Definitely on my list of sisters to boot into something like a VM to test out in the future. If I wasn't so worried about breaking things with rolling release, Tumbleweed would be much higher up on my list.

Why not go 100 percent corporation free? https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

These distros reject everything that is not free as in free speech. This means no binary drivers, no binary firmware, no binary software. While this is very idealistic, not in a bad way, it might be impractical for most people. Start with an "easy" Linux, you can always go the hardcore way afterwards.
- Especially people who play any kind of semi-modern game. The open source nvidia drivers are just not there when it comes to performance.
- The idiocy goes beyond rejecting non-free software. For example, Debian ticks all the boxes needed to be added to that list but it's not due to the fact that they dare to have a repository with non-free software that isn't even included in the OS.
Because thos distros suck for any kind of real life use case. If you want a working OS with for gaming, your office job or just regular browsing, then this ain't it chief. If you want to have a project you have to tinker with every day, then sure, go for it! But most people don't want to be bothered by their OS.
Back when I used to use Arch (btw), I had the bright idea of switching to Parabola because 99% of what I used was open source, only to find out that there's a hidden 5th freedom that's required for something to be classified as truly free software: Stallman's freedom to have his balls fondled. It tried to uninstall half of my packages because of ideological stupidity such as the software having optional closed source add-ons even though the part that I had installed was 100% open source. These distros are useless toys.