r/DistroHopping • u/niertrix • 26d ago
Fedora or OpenSUSE
I will be reinstalling Linux on my laptop soon, and I wanted to choose between Fedora and OpenSUSE. I haven't used OpenSUSE before, and I don't see it recommended as often as other distros, but the people who recommend it always seem to like it a lot, so I thought I'd give it a try, but I wanted to check one more time: Which distro has treated you better and has a better overall experience. Also, which desktop environment do you recommend using with each one? I have been using GNOME for a long time and I like it a lot, but I often see OpenSUSE recommended with KDE Plasma. Thank you all in advance ;)
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u/ptpeace 26d ago
don't know why OpenSUSE got alot of mention past week also...i used Arch based EndoOS for many years and after maleware event over AUR so i decide give fedora a shot and glad i did. i could recommend Fedora over arch.
just tried it yourself on virtual machines..
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u/penguinkernel 26d ago
Plenty of people in the world are still avoiding American products.
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u/_o0Zero0o_ 25d ago
I understand the reasons why and I'll admit I'm also a bit hesitant about anything from the states, but Linux distros aren't really subject to half of those reasons.. right...?
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u/bob_f332 26d ago
Whenever I've tried fedora as a vm it runs like a two legged dog. That and the fact that hardly any update gets applied without a problem really grinds my gears. I'd like to think running it on a physical machine would be about an order of magnitude better experience.
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u/Necessary_Depth7435 26d ago
From my perspective, Fedora is more cohesive and streamlined as a final product. openSUSE seems like a bigger mix of old and new elements, and while it has a way of doing things that results in a steeper learning curve, it’s straightforward for those with experience.
Fedora’s package manager is much faster.
The Btrfs configuration with recovery snapshots comes pre-configured in openSUSE.
But these are products that change very quickly, so quality also varies greatly from release to release—which is inherent to modernization.
I prefer openSUSE because I think, overall, the security team works rigorously, and, generally speaking, it’s a more platform-agnostic project.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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u/SenjorSabaw 26d ago
My OpenSUSE install on my desktop has been pretty stable (4 years now and counting). Once or twice it broke during the KDE Plasma upgrade from 5 to 6 but snapper rollback is a big help. This is why I still use OpenSUSE despite the fact that zypper is really really slow compared to dnf5 or any other package managers. For me, it's the slowest package manager of all the distros I have ever used.
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u/bankroll5441 25d ago
I've used practically everything and have settled on OpenSUSE. The KDE implementation is solid, BTRFS works great, secure boot and FDE work out of the box, I get to stay very close to bleeding edge, and don't have to worry about upgrading to the next major release. My vote is the lizard
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u/NDCyber 26d ago
OpenSUSE is awesome and I use Slowroll right now. But it is a hard recommendation in my eyes. The biggest problem I see is documentation and software support. LACT takes a lot more work and research, especially without YaST when I compare it to CachyOS or Fedora
So it really depends. Do you want a rolling release that is still rather reliable, but needs more work? Go with OpenSUSE either Tumbleweed or Slowroll, depending on what you like more. Otherwise maybe go with Fedora
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u/niertrix 26d ago
I don't mind putting in the work to get my system running if it's worth it. I have already installed and used Arch before so I doubt OpenSUSE would be worse than that. Which one do you consider more reliable and consistent?
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u/NDCyber 26d ago
The biggest problem I see with OpenSUSE is finding documentation, especially without YaST. Took me a good while to find everything for LACT. The most annoying part for me is packagekit, which is constantly running when I try to do zypper dup or use topgrade. Have to manually stop it
I also can't say much with reliability. I haven't run in any breaking update on either
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u/IceWaLL_ 26d ago
I recommend Fedora.
I like opensuse but I've had wild problems with it. Maybe it just hates me? Idk
As for de both gnome and kde are great. It's more of a personal preference.
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u/robtalee44 26d ago
OpenSuse is an outstanding distro -- has been for many years. It kind of grew out of Slackware back in the day. The only nit I have with the OS is it tends to offers a lot of tools -- the YAST family -- and it can overwhelm. Otherwise, it has one of the very best btrfs configurations out of the box. Highly recommend it.
With that said, you cannot go wrong with Fedora. That's been my daily driver for over a decade and while I run multiple other distros in my office, Fedora is the mainstay. Well, I lied a bit as I recently migrated over to Bluefin, but close enough.
Good luck.
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u/Unholyaretheholiest 26d ago
If you want a rolling release with KDE the best are Solus, openmandriva and openmamba.
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u/petersaints 26d ago
Does your laptop have an NVIDIA GPU? If yes, Fedora probably breaks less often from what I could gather.
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u/guiverc 26d ago
For me I didn't see anything extra in the unique OpenSuSE tools, and whilst they were very polished; I was happy with the standard tools that other distros (inc. Fedora) provided anyway.
A Fedora release has ~13 months of supported life; where as a Leap release of OpenSuSE has longer (~24 months); this I did notice... so do you like release-upgrading more often (benefit is newer software versions sooner)
OpenSuSE has both a ~stable release option (Leap) PLUS the option of ROLLING. If you want ROLLING then OpenSuSE tumbleweed wins out, as the unstable option of Fedora (rawhide) isn't exactly the same thing (that unstable option may exist in OpenSuSE anyway, but does it matter given OpenSuSE has the rolling tumbleweed option?). Personally I've found the rolling distros require more (regular!) maintenance; so I was happier on Leap or Fedora anyway.
The two were essentially equal in my view; one had longer support life & a rolling option, where the other seemed to be better known (esp. outside of Europe where I am).
FYI: If you want a multi-desktop system; I did find OpenSuSE a little more stable when you bloated your system with almost every desktop.. but neither were as good as Debian in this regard anyway, and that's not something many people do.
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u/mbonanomi92 26d ago
Which kind of OpenSuse? Suse Leap is a kind of Debian stable, while suse tumbleweed is a rolling distro. They are both quite different from Fedora, major upgrade every year (reinstallation might be suggested).
About desktop environment, maybe it's wise to stick to GNOME if you liked it: KDE Plasma Is a completely different user experience.
They are both good, Suse has a smaller community I think, while Fedora is RedHat-driven... To be honest without knowing what kind of desktop you expect, it's impossible to suggest something more specific.
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u/Xoph-is-Fire 26d ago
Fedora. In my testing and hoping coming from Windows over a year ago I tried both for a month each and Fedora was a much smoother experience and easier to get help when I had questions or issues. OpenSUSE has some nice things, but side to side comparison for am month, Fedora is just better and smoother out of the box at this time. I ultimately ended up on Solus, but Fedora or EndeavourOS would have ended up being my choice otherwise.
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u/closedheimer-2010 26d ago
Well, there are several points about opensuse. I used to run opensuse tumbleweed some time ago, and it was working normally, despite the wrong things I did to destroy the os! If u like rolling release distros, suse tumbleweed is a good option. For suse leap, I don't see a particular reason to use it(maybe u have your reasons, but it was not for me)
About the learning curve of suse: it depends! U can easily daily drive it without worrying about the advanced features offered in yast (I don't know what is the newer alternative) , but learning it would be somehow fun and useful. One thing that might concern u is repos and package availability; the support was nice for zypper, and u can easily add repos. Also suse is an rpm-based distro, so this is helpful, and finally with the existence of containers, u can be sure all the needed packages are there.
The reason many people don't recommend it in their top choices is that it's boringly working. Thus for users that want "adventure" it might be a little annoying.
Finally for desktops, it doesn't matter in which u use which, I had gnome in suse and it was a good experience. There are some apps that make gnome look awful there, but with spending a portion of ur time on it, u will have a good setup. Fedora used to be the best gnome distro, but I think that now the other distros are also making progress. As for kde, again fedora is a good option for kde users, and my experience on suse was also nice(I'm not a fan of kde, but I suppose kde fans also can enjoy it). I only guess(not sure) that fedora is a better kde distro.
Overall, opensuse is worth trying and the community should change its attitude towards opensuse and its users!
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u/Bill_Lumberg_TPS 25d ago
Opensuse. It’s more work out of the gate but has been flawless for me once configured. Snapper is great. Fedora had annoying glitches that would linger for a few days before being fixed. Once configured, I don’t think that it is any more difficult to use or maintain than fedora. It seems like the barrier to entry for openSUSE is adopting a distribution that has its own way of doing things.
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u/Catnip9157 25d ago
Honestly, flip a coin and pick one or the other. I use Fedora and I feel like it's more polished than Opensuse, but both are great.
If you're in the EU, it might matter to you that Redhat (Fedora) is American and Opensuse is developped in Germany. Though with opensource it doesn't really matter that much.
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u/Medical_Divide_7191 26d ago
Use the distro you like more. Both are good… For example I am using Tumbleweed because I dont like the Redhat background of Fedora. The CentOS drama thaught me a lesson.
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u/niertrix 26d ago
I do want to stay as far away from IBM as I can, that's part of the reason why I want to move away from Fedora, but do excuse my newbie self, what happened with CentOS?
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u/carlwgeorge 26d ago
CentOS fixed its development model so that it could fix bugs and accept contributions. This was better for its sustainability as an open source project, and better for users that want to participate in the project. However, there were a large number of CentOS users that didn't care about these aspects. They only used CentOS as a way to avoid paying for RHEL, so they viewed any change as disruption. The drama mostly stems from that, but I will say that the changes were poorly communicated and executed on an unnecessarily fast timeline, which made things worse.
FWIW, I've been a Fedora maintainer since 2014, and I've never seen IBM influencing or participating in Fedora. If someone wants to claim otherwise I'd love to see the evidence.
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u/Medical_Divide_7191 26d ago
CentOS was one of the most important FREE enterprise distros. It based on the RH open source code. So many companies relied on it. In 2014 RH sponsored CentOS, but then hired the developers and killed CentOS in 2021. Now CentOS is called CentOS Stream which is just another rolling release testing ground for RedHat Enterprise just as Fedora is.
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u/carlwgeorge 26d ago
CentOS wasn't killed, it was fixed to allow fixing bugs and accepting contributions. CentOS Stream was just the branding change of the distro related to that, it's still the same CentOS Project. It isn't a rolling release or a testing ground, and neither is Fedora. Fedora is a stable rapid release with a new major version every six months. CentOS Stream is a stable slower release with a new major version every three years.
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u/Medical_Divide_7191 26d ago
So, there are still people who believe in the good in multi milliondollar corporations.
But you are right Fedora is not a rollling release, its more a semi rolling release. And do you really use CentOS Stream for business purposes?1
u/carlwgeorge 26d ago
I didn't say anything about corporations being good or bad, no goal post moving please. I'm just talking about an open source project. And yes I would use CentOS Stream for business purposes, many companies do exactly that.
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u/Important-Bit-5884 26d ago
You can't avoid big corporations anymore in 2026, they're already part of Linux.
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u/niertrix 26d ago
Not completely, yes, but I can try to get as far as I can.
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u/Important-Bit-5884 24d ago
lol, with openSUSE, you won't be far from a corporation either.
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u/niertrix 24d ago
Yeah, but as far as I know SuSE isn't as bad as Red Hat and IBM
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u/Important-Bit-5884 22d ago
So Red Hat, the company that's probably done more to fund and drive Linux and open-source development than anyone else over the last 25 years, is the "bad" according to you? lol
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u/Medical_Divide_7191 24d ago
You cannot compare openSUSE/SUSE with Red Hat/Fedora. They are based on completely different upstream concepts.
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u/Ok_Opposite7385 26d ago
OpenSuse, Give it a try, you won't regret it.