openSUSE

Reader supplied reviews for openSUSE Average rating 8.5 from 513 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on openSUSE? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- tumbleweed16.015.615.042.342.242.113.213.112.312.212.111.411.311.211.111.010.310.210.110.09.39.29.19.08.28.18.07.37.27.17.06.46.36.26.16.05.35.2 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: tumbleweed Rating: 3 Date: 2026-01-11 Votes: 0 I've been running openSUSE Tumbleweed (KDE Plasma) as my main system for several years now (since ~2022/2023). At first I loved the rolling-release freshness. But after years of use, the system has become more unpleasant than enjoyable. The issues pile up and become deal-breakers: Packman Repository Forced Dependency You basically have to add Packman for any real multimedia (codecs, ffmpeg, MP3/AAC/H.264). Without it, many videos/music just don't play properly. But adding Packman means constant update headaches: Vendor changes, delays (Packman lags behind Tumbleweed snapshots), "nothing provides" errors, waiting days for mirrors to catch up. It's the most frequent cause of failed dups. Qt5 → Qt6 Migration Chaos The switch to Qt6/Plasma 6 (early 2024) broke things badly. Many apps (including some KDE ones) behave erratically, dependencies conflict, things crash or don't start. The transition was messy for months, and even now (2026) some things still don't work right. BTRFS Corruption After Updates One update completely killed my btrfs journaling -> corruption. Boot → emergency mode, but the shell was useless. Hours of trial-and-error following official instructions – zero success. What saved me? KDE Neon Live USB – btrfs check --repair in minutes, fixed. YaST Expert Partitioner Disaster Tried to format/label a new empty 16 TB external drive → YaST unmounted /home, overwrote my existing /home fstab entry with the new drive's label, wrong fs type (ext4), "user" option. Result: Unbootable system. Emergency mode barely starts or is unusable. Recovery? Again Kubuntu Live USB → fstab edit in minutes. In no other partitioning tool (GParted, GNOME Disks, KDE Partition Manager, fdisk/mkfs) have I ever seen fstab get overwritten like that. YaST does it "helpfully" – and it can destroy your boot in seconds. Summary Tumbleweed is technically impressive when everything works, but the constant pitfalls (Packman pain, unreliable btrfs recovery, dangerous YaST behavior) make it feel hostile to normal users. Recovery almost always requires booting another distro's live USB (Ubuntu-family) because openSUSE's own tools often fail. If you're an expert who can recover from anything – fine. For everyone else (including inexperienced users like me): No-Go. I'm switching to Kubuntu – stable KDE without the drama. openSUSE Tumbleweed – I won't touch it again, lost too much time and nerves. Rating: 3/10 (great potential, but too many landmines) Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 16.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-01-08 Votes: 6 If I had to describe openSUSE Leap in one word, it would be “oasis.” In a world overcrowded with GNU/Linux distributions, this one is truly set and forget. It gives me confidence. I can leave the system alone and focus on real work, knowing it won’t break or surprise me. I’m a professional music producer and also do a lot of development in Java, Bash, and Python (Qt/Gtk). Our shared family laptop runs games for my kids, browsing and office apps for my wife, and a DAW plus VS Code for me. Everyone is happy — and that says a lot. I run plain, vanilla KDE. The only thing I changed was the wallpaper. Pros - YaST / Cockpit-style configuration that actually makes sense - Sensible security defaults - Automatic system snapshots with Btrfs - Easy, predictable installation - Rock-solid stability — no drama - Very good documentation Con - I had to explicitly allow my network printer because of the strict security defaults (a minor annoyance, but understandable) Most of the apps I use are appimages with appimage-integrator installed. Kdenvive (viideo-editing) Gimp-Krita (image manipulation) VSCode (programming) Reaper(Sound Engineering) Midas Edit (Live Audio Mixing) Games: Minecraft, Roblox, Mame Cloud: kDrive Office: OnlyOffice, LibreOffice Other: Obsidian, Musescore, VLC, Virtual Machine Manager, Telegram, Viber, Anydesk, QBittorrent, Okular, Brave, Naps2 Overall, Leap feels mature, calm, and dependable. It doesn’t try to impress — it just works. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 16.0 Rating: 1 Date: 2025-12-28 Votes: 0 Okay, so why do I rate the lowest as OpenSuse has always been my favorite distro. I start the install, and everything goes well. And then, boum, a black screen. Chatgpt informed me it is due to my Nvidia GPU and I should use nomodeset but that went really wrong. Maybe I did it wrong, but it is an issue that other distros do not have. And this for a professional distro. I hope on a correction. I had the same problem with Tumbleweed, brw. And that is weird, as I could always install Tumbleweed without any problem. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 513 reader reviews of openSUSE...