openSUSE

Reader supplied reviews for openSUSE Average rating 8.5 from 536 review(s) Please specify which version of the distribtion you are reviewing. 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: 2 Date: 2026-05-03 Country: Switzerland Votes: 0 openSUSE Tumbleweed 20260430 – The Fossil That Refuses to Evolve Reviewer: LegacyWorkstationUser Hardware: HP Z600, Dual Xeon X5675, 80 GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro P5000, Legacy BIOS Rating: 2/10 I really wanted to like Tumbleweed. After coming from CachyOS, I was hoping for a stable rolling release with strong NUMA support for my dual-Xeon workstation and decent legacy NVIDIA Pascal support. Instead, I got a frustrating lesson in how openSUSE still manages to alienate users in 2026. Installation: All Promise, No Delivery The installer looks modern and detects my hardware perfectly — it even correctly identifies the Quadro P5000 as needing the proprietary driver. But that’s where the help ends. There is no option during installation to enable third-party repositories or install proprietary NVIDIA drivers. You get Nouveau by default, even though the system clearly knows better. In 2026, virtually every other distribution (Pop!_OS, Nobara, Bazzite, even plain Ubuntu) offers a simple checkbox for proprietary drivers. Tumbleweed still forces you to do everything manually after installation. The Post-Install Experience After installation I booted into a broken X11 session with an ancient kernel (7.x series) and no Wayland. Nouveau was installed instead of the proper driver. The system showed me a long list of available drivers during setup — many incompatible — but then installed the one that makes gaming impossible. Flatpak support is messy, repositories needed manual fixing, and my German keyboard layout reset to US English. Simple things that work out-of-the-box on other distros require terminal commands here. The Philosophy Problem openSUSE seems more interested in ideological purity than user experience. They detect your hardware correctly but refuse to make it work properly during installation. This isn’t freedom — it’s forcing users to jump through hoops. Verdict Tumbleweed has excellent technical foundations (great NUMA performance, good BTRFS snapshots, polished KDE Plasma), but the user experience on legacy hardware with NVIDIA is actively painful. If you love tinkering and have modern AMD hardware, it might be great. For legacy BIOS + older NVIDIA + “I just want it to work” users, it feels stuck in the past. Pros: • Strong NUMA / multi-CPU performance • Good BTRFS + snapshots • Polished KDE Plasma when it works Cons: • No proprietary driver option during installation • False hope from hardware detection • Terminal-heavy post-install workflow • Wayland disabled by default (Nouveau) • Broken repository setup out of the box • Keyboard layout bugs • Generally unfriendly for 2026 users who expect convenience Final Score: 2/10 Avoid on legacy workstation hardware unless you enjoy suffering. openSUSE still hasn’t learned that the user, not the ideology, should come first. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: tumbleweed Rating: 6 Date: 2026-04-22 Country: France Votes: 10 - "Tumbleweed is the best, most stable rolling release. It just works perfectly" - "OpenSuse Tumbleweed should be the Linux distribution by default for everyone" These are sentences I heard when I did all the searching about the distribution of choice. I was searching for a powerful Linux distribution, perfect for Rendering with Blender, drawing with Krita, and good enough for games, with best performance, stability, etc... All my researches mostly led me to OpenSuse Tumbleweed. AND... after a few days, I have to say it is possibly right. That system is maybe more stable than other rolling-release while having the advantages of those systems (fresher packages, more performance thanks to updated Mesa and kernels), it is maybe easy to install, and safe with its snapshots, via snapper, BUT The post-install process... was a true HELL! First, my proprietary driver for my Huion tablet. It worked on Mint, worked on Solus, worked on Manjaro, worked on Fedora... On Tumbleweed, it lacked a dependancy. And DAMN, it was HARD to figure out which dependancy I needed to install. Second, the codecs... I know it's not the only Linux system to install without codecs, but the only method to install them require that you use Packman, and when you read the Wiki, they say "Warning: Additional repositories are not officially supported by openSUSE. You are extremely likely to have issues with updates in future. You must be confident to resolve these." I don't know if other systems have a similar "dangerous" way to install what is necessary nowadays on an OS, but this is NOT reassuring at all. Third, Piper doesn't work. Whatever I tried, Piper, which worked on other systems by default to recognize my mouse... doesn't work at all. Fourth, Lutris lacked a dependancy which makes YaST saying Lutris may break if we decide to install it without. Happily, it works though, but why is a dependancy lacking? First OS when I see a problem with Lutris Fifth, Heroic will not work. It needs a flatpak or an appimage. But since flatpak may be an issue with recognizing controllers, I choose appimage, and so, I'll need to check constantly the updates. Not a big deal, but what's the point of having a software in the repository if it never works. Sixth, and this was really the worst... Steam works with my AMD GPU. My whole computer is using my GPU... All additional package to make my GPU work perfectly were installed. But when I open Blender... "No graphic card is detected." I had to use a Generative AI to seek help (because the wiki regarding graphic cards is crazy. Feels like installing an Arch at that point) and the solution was crazy as well. I had to add $USER in "render" and "video" groups. A thing that... I never saw ANY other Linux requiring. Now that I dealt with all of that though... The system seems excellent. Blender is indeed far more performant, my video games runs smoothly and better... But all of those situations makes me lower my rating from 10 to 6. "OpenSuse Tumbleweed should be the Linux distribution by default for everyone"!? Well, if you need Linux only for a very basic use, that could work. But as soon as you need it for a specific, not very usual task, I will never recommend it. I spent 8 hours on the installation, and on the resolution of all my problems. And with everything that happened, I feel like the main problem with OpenSuse Tumbleweed... is that it's too minimalistic (lack of codecs, lack of dependencies installed by default on other systems and necessary in some cases), and it feels like a too closed system (why not adding the $USER in Render and Video by default if it may be needed? It doesn't seem to affect anything on the system apart from making some Multimedia softwares work. So why?). Probably one of the best Linux distribution, indeed... but which need so SO many improvements. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: tumbleweed Rating: 10 Date: 2026-04-09 Country: Germany Votes: 19 In 1999 I started with SUSELinux 6.2, 6.3 and 7.1, then came Red Hat Linux 7.0 and finally Debian 3.0. FreeBSD from 4.5 to 5.2 were also used. From 2004 to 2025 I used MAC OS X or macOS the most. But in VM's I continued to try distributions, including Slackware. As of November 2025 (since I was tired of proprietary software) I bought Acer Swift 16 × AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 w/ Radeon 860M with 1TB SDD and 32GB RAM. I then tried the following for each distribution for several weeks: Mint, LMDE (both always froze for me), Fedora (works great), Debian (I used the most of all, is very good, but far too conservative for a desktop) and of course Arch Linux, which is not bad but had problems with the printer. Luckily I still had an ace up my sleeve and that was OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. OpenSUSE Leap is also conservative for me, I prefer Debian, but Tumbleweed is what I was looking for. A rolling release that is more stable/reliable than Arch Linux. Of course I uninstalled Yast2 because the tool is already outdated and no one needs it. Myrlin and Cockpit are more modern, although I don't use them either. Zypper is awesome and almost as good as pacman and dnf and anyway much faster and just as good as apt. Since then I haven't had to touch any other distro. Can highly recommend to users with some experience. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 536 reader reviews of openSUSE...