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Review: openSUSE 15.3

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SUSE

I had mostly positive experiences while running openSUSE 15.3. The distribution does a lot of things well. The installer is both fairly straight forward to use and yet, under the surface, offers a lot of advanced options. This started me off with a good first impression, as did the initial welcome screen.

I deeply appreciate that openSUSE is one of the only Linux distributions to entirely embrace advanced filesystems. Its administrative tools automatically take snapshots of changes and we can rollback to previous snapshots from the boot menu. Apart from FreeBSD, I don't know of any other commonly used open source operating system which makes proper use of advanced filesystems such as Btrfs and ZFS.

Speaking of the administration tools, YaST is quite powerful. We can manipulate most aspects of the underlying operating system through YaST and, while some modules are overly complex (for less experienced users), more advanced users will find a lot of useful tools in the YaST panel.

There are some weak points in openSUSE's armour. The web-based application store, promoted by the welcome window, is really rough and overly complicated. It shows far too many package options for simple searches and depends on the user clicking on the proper link to download for the right edition of openSUSE. It will even show packages and download links for packages which haven't been built for openSUSE 15.3 yet.

The distribution offers a short support cycle. openSUSE Leap claims to be a long-term support (LTS) release, but only gets 18 months of updates. This is roughly the same as Fedora and much less than Ubuntu's community editions (which receive 36 months of support) or Ubuntu, Debian, and FreeBSD - each of which offer 60 months of support. Despite its rapid upgrade pace, the provided packages are mostly over a year old. This means openSUSE gives us the upgrade pace of Fedora along with the software age of more conservative distributions.

Not having multimedia codecs available out of the box is rare these days. This, combined with the complex command line steps outlined in the documentation and the failure of applications like Parole to find missing codecs after offering to install them (even after community repositories have been enabled), means new users have an overly complicated and confusing path ahead of them, compared against the experience offered by other distributions, if they want to watch videos.

One thing which I kept coming back to while using openSUSE is that it feels like a distribution for administrators and developers, not for regular home users. Some really complex tasks, like setting up Btrfs, working with complex firewalls, setting up network shares, comparing snapshots, and so on are quite easy (thanks to YaST). However, some basic actions such as playing video files, downloading desktop applications, or reading manual pages are unusually complex on openSUSE. It is a distribution which makes complex tasks easy and simple tasks harder than most other mainstream distributions.

The user interface is fairly polished and the newly upgraded Xfce desktop works well. The system is responsive and worked well with my test environments. I think this fairly smooth experience will entice people, particularly more experienced users, to run openSUSE. openSUSE is a little on the heavy side in terms of memory usage, but the array of convenient features that accompany it more than makes up for the difference in my opinion.

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