Why OpenSuse is said to be KDE Plasma first?
Why OpenSuse is said to be KDE Plasma first?
I have heard that for a long time, but lately since the Red Hat and RHEL thing happened I have heard it more.
I've never given OpenSuse a try, not really because I don't like it or anything just because I've been fine with my current distro, but I've been thinking about it and I'll possibly install it in a VM and if I like it I'll install it on my personal machine.
The only thing that really concerns me are the Nvidia proprietary drivers, they are installed during the installation when it detects my hardware or I have to install them manually?
Edit: After a while playing with the VM I decided to install it on my PC and my goodness, it's great! Among the things to highlight, I find it incredible that they have things like Yuzu or RPCS3 in their available repositories, in my previous distro I had to use flatpak for that or appimages and many times those programs did not recognize my GPU (possibly because I used Wayland). I also love that it has apparmor installed by default and even that I can access snapshots from grub!
Plasma is just well optimized in openSUSE with sensible defaults like animation speeds etc. and it's really up to date. At least on Tumbleweed which I recommend over Leap anyway.
As for nVidia I can't speak for myself as I have AMD card.
I’ve run Tumbleweed in several VM’s, and it’s great, but I wonder how bad the upkeep is of a rolling release distribution. Do you update every day? Every week? I’d get OCD, probably. How about any danger of mucking up your system versus a more stable release distro?
I update it every now and then, basically when I feel like it. Sometimes it's day or two apart, sometimes it's after month or even more. For rolling distro I'd say it's incredibly stable. And even if something breaks (and with my lack of proper skills it happens) there's easy fix with automatic snapper snapshots. It never really broke on me and I'm running it for two and half years (being my first linux as main OS). I really can't recommend it enough.
I see people say they turn off notifications about updates and just do it once a week, but man, if I open Discover and see 30 updates sitting there I cannot ignore it. I get real twitchy about it. So my update routine is daily. Every morning with my fresh cup of coffee I run "zypper dup". If all goes well, I start my day. If all does not go well, I rollback to the previous state with snapper, and then start my day. Using snapper takes about 30 seconds, and frankly nvidia is the only reason I can remember ever having to use rollback.
Tumbleweed is really painless to maintain, even if you update every day. You don't have to update every day, but my particularly specialized Update OCD doesn't allow me to wait a week, it seems.
I run Gentoo, but do a daily update when I think of it. Usually never takes more than a minute or two. If it’s a kernel update I just reboot when I’m finished.
The "issue" of rolling releases is what you need to update ALL packages at once
only updating a part of them or installing a new one without updating anything else might lead to some issues like mismatching dynamic library versions (=the software won't start)
From what I understand, the KDE team used to use OpenSUSE as their distro of choice when testing KDE. This has changed now to KDE Neon being the flagship KDE experience. Also OpenSUSE will install Nvidia Drivers during install if you select that option. You'll have to enable the Nvidia repo later on too. But it's dead simple. Definitely give OpenSUSE a try. I've been using for a few months now on my laptop and it's fantastic. It just works, including BTRFS snapshotting, right out of the box.
Plasma works really flawless on Tumbleweed for me. I never tried Fedora, but OpenSUSE is a lot better than Ubuntu for me. Less bugs and you always get the latest versions. NVIDIA driver is really easy to install: there are official repositories, they are updated just like any package. I think among the traditional distributions Tumbleweed is the best one.
You have to install them manually, but it's pretty easy thanks to yast and zypper.
I found it way easier compared to arch or even manjaro.
Thank you very much for providing a link, it was really super simple.
fwiw I remember reading around a year ago, a post by the KDE contributor Pointiest Stick that he actually thinks that Fedora has a better Plasma experience than Opensuse. I can't find the post where he said that though so take it with a grain of salt. But as someone who does use Fedora with Plasma, it feels like it mostly works fine. The only big issue I can think of atm is that the Plasma Discover auto-updater just doesn't work at all. It doesn't auto update. That could just be an issue specific to me though.
Fedora seems to me a wonderful distribution and what I like the most is that it is like the "Vanilla" flavor of each DE and that it is really innovative. I've tried their Gnome and Plasma flavors and it's been pretty good, except for a few things:
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Inability to install Nvidia drivers: In the past, maybe a year or year and a half ago I tried Fedora but when I installed Nvidia drivers and rebooted the system I had the problem that I always had a black screen, I reinstalled several times and I exhausted myself Now that I think about it, it is very possible that this is a problem of some Wayland dependency in Plasma, because that has happened to me in other distros and I simply changed to X11 and installed said package, or I could do it from TTY, but I never thought about that .
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I have nothing against snaps or flatpaks and it seems ridiculous to argue about that, everyone uses what works for them and likes it and in my case I use all the available package formats, but there are some Firefox extensions that I don't they work because of the sandbox environment that flatpak provides, and some other programs that have a similar problem.
I guess all that will be fixed, one day I'll give it a try again.
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I really don't like KDE. I know it's all user preference by an xfce and cinnamon guy.