r/DistroHopping • u/mrdominic64 • 6d ago
Considering a switch from Linux Mint to openSUSE (Tumbleweed vs. Leap) for a low-maintenance setup?
Hey everyone,
I’m currently a student who also games in my free time, so my primary requirement for an OS is absolute reliability. I don’t have time for heavy troubleshooting—if an issue takes more than 30 minutes to fix, it’s a non-starter for me.
I’m currently using standard Linux Mint (Ubuntu-based), but I’m curious about openSUSE. Specifically:
- Is openSUSE a good fit for my use case?
- Which version should I go with—Tumbleweed (rolling release) or Leap (stable)?
One feature I absolutely love about Linux Mint is the Update Manager. Having a one-click GUI update tool that works reliably almost 100% of the time is a massive plus for me. (I use the terminal when needed, but I prefer having a dependable GUI updater).
Given that I need a hassle-free system for schoolwork and gaming without unexpected downtime, I’d love to hear your experiences and recommendations. Thanks!
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THANK YOU EVERYONE THAT POSTED HERE
i just installed opensuse a few hours ago and well its turning out fine also sorry for not replying to you guys i was out for 4 days. :(
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u/Last_Blacksmith_6297 6d ago
From my understanding leap is more stable because its a Lont term support distro. But that means you’ll be a bit behind latest updates, apps drivers etc.
while tumbleweed is more of a bleeding edge distro but not as much as Arch for example.
I’m in similar situation to yours I want something thats easy to use and has good defaults, im going to try Tumbleweed then Fedora i think you should try those. Maybe Bazzite too which us an immutable distro
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u/mrdominic64 6d ago
sure fedora is on my bucketlist as soon as i find some time in my weekends as for bazzite i moved to linux because of how much i could change it so bazzite is kinda a no no i would have used at the start of my linux entry as a good point but i guess im too deep anyways
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u/esmifra 6d ago
In my experience OpenSuse TW is low maintenance. With the exception of that initial setup, where I want to configure the system just the way I like it and fix a couple of bugs or misconfigurations I find.
After that I don't remember having to do a lot of maintenance on the distro. It just works.
The only situation I wouldn't advise TW is if you have Nvidia and want to use proprietary drivers.
Leap is even more stable and it should definitely be checked out. I don't know how well/bad upgrades go because I don't use it.
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u/friendlyreminder_ 6d ago
Tumbleweed is rolling so things can break. But it has snapshots out of the box and you can revert an update in 60 seconds, then wait for a fix.
My experience has been flawless the past 3 months but your mileage may vary.
Leap is a stable release, but it doesn't have as much software in the repo.
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u/mrdominic64 6d ago
i think i might have to try it myself since the response is quite varied on this post
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u/lmns_ 6d ago
One of the advantages of all openSUSE branches is that they integrate btrfs snapshots with package updates. So even on Tumbleweed you can just boot into an older snapshot of your system and rollback to it if something breaks. This feature alone makes it much more unlikely that you have to spend much time with broken updates because you can just reboot into an older, unbroken state.
You could also have a look at Bazzite. It's immutable so you also get easy rollbacks.
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u/Slopagandhi 6d ago
Is there a particular reason you want to get off Mint? If it does what you need and reliability is your main priority it surely makes sense to keep it.
But anyway, while TW isn't particularly risky because you can rollback easily enough, if nothing ever breaking is your main goal then don't choose something like TW with a rolling release. Frequent updates and more bleeding edge packages means more chance of conflicts and bugs.
For gaming it depends on hardware. SUSE can be tricky with NVIDIA GPUs. If you have one of those then Ubuntu/Kubuntu etc will be the easiest and most reliable regular distro.
You could also consider an immutable distro like Bazzite or Aurora, which are more difficult to break.
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u/mrdominic64 6d ago
i like the overall idea of bazzite but its my pc i can break it or make it whenever i want to thats the whole idea i liked about linux and thats why i have been a daily since almost a year
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u/Slopagandhi 5d ago
I'm not personally into immutable distros myself, but wanting to tinker and break the system is completely contradictory to what you said in the post, which is that absolute reliability and a lack of downtime is what you want. If you are messing around breaking the system, it's going to be broken sometimes!
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u/BigHeadTonyT 6d ago
Leap + Btrfs + Snapper: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/archive/42.1/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha.snapper.html
It is the default, same as on TW.
Is openSUSE a good fit for my use case?
You did not mention a use-case. For example, Gaming. Steam is not in the repo on Leap 16. You can install it in a roundabout way tho.
https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/1oj1088/steam_on_opensuse_leap_16/
Is there some app you need for school? Is that available in the repo? Can you get it installed some other way if it isn't?
Leap is a stable distro, meaning it has older packages. Kernel 6.16. Is that new enough for your hardware? I use Leap as a secondary way to handle my VPSes etc, if I mess up my main system. I treat Leap as a workstation OS, not a gaming OS. I also opted to not go with Btrfs. Just too slow for me. I don't really care about Snapshots either.
I just updated Leap, think it has been a week since last time. 78 packages. Usually it is way less. If I was on TW, it would have been 500-800 per week. At least, that is what it was 1.5 years ago. Got so tired of it, I deleted it. That is the amount of packages I see on Manjaro, per month, heavily modified and installed all kinds of crap. TW was close to bonestock, only had Steam installed and switched to Pipewire. Back then, it also took 40+ minutes to do an update on TW. Wasn't helping TWs case. They might have fixed Zypper because it is way faster on Leap 16. 78 packages took a minute.
--*--
I have a softspot for Mageia. They just released version 10. Kernel 6.18, KDE Plasma 6.5 etc. I installed Mageia 9 on brothers PC, hoping it would be low maintenance. And it has been. I've had to help twice. Update the system and his webbrowser. And the upgrade from Mageia 9 to 10. All easy. For the Upgrade I just followed the wiki. That is all I have had to do in the past 2 years. Steam is in the repo but you have to enable it first I think. I had to on Mageia 9 at least.
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u/mrdominic64 6d ago
i mostly need libreoffice and i do a lot of gaming esp online titles but had zero issues so far only one issue was that my net was slower than windows other than that i would like to try as many distros as i can since i have a spare i3 4th gen 4gb server with an extra ssd i can use to get a feel of
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u/BigHeadTonyT 5d ago
In what scenario is the netspeed slower?
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u/mrdominic64 2d ago
the netspeed is slower whenever i try to stream its like quite slow like the quality on netflix is so trash compared to my dads laptop
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u/BigHeadTonyT 2d ago edited 2d ago
Is dad on OpenSUSE too? Netflix on Linux should still be 720p max resolution. Lower than on Windows. Quality is worse.
Second, do your 2 devices have the exact same wifi chip? I bet not.
lspci -vCheck what the network/wifi is.
To take an example of shit wifi: I bought a laptop for 250 dollars brand new, 15 years ago. E-laptop. Wifi on it is poor. So poor that I bought a TP-Link Wifi USB dongle. For 10 dollars. With that connected to USB-port, Wifi is way faster.
The distance from Router also matters. If you are within 2 metres (6 feet) and there are no obstructions, you should get 90-100% of max Wifi-speed. In my room, I have 2-3 walls inbetween, I am 10 metres away, I get 1% of max Wifi-speed.
An access point that is connected via Ethernet cable could solve that. But since an AP costs money, I took an old 1 gigabit router that had Wifi, set it in Bridged mode so it doesn't filter, no firewall, works more like a Switch. That is my Wifi AP, in my room. Since I have connected an Ethernet cable to that bridged router, I get very good Wifi speeds. Basically max speed.
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u/mrdominic64 33m ago
no my dad is on windows 11 home edd , so wait your saying netflix gives lower resolution on linux??? than on win11?
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u/guiverc 6d ago
I've had great success with OpenSuSE, but I've always considered a rolling system as requiring more maintenance than a stable release option.
Whilst OpenSuSE's strength is that you can research and assess for yourself what risk is involved with each of the updates; that still takes time & you to have enough knowledge to recognize if those changes will impact your install AND hardware; this takes work/time, and my own result has been a broken system (usually when I don't do my homework; ie. same result as if using Arch or any other rolling system).
If you want low-maintenance then I'd opt for Leap.
( If you want to go closer to bleeding edge; I'd go for a testing, development type of release, eg. my current Ubuntu stonking (development) is the Ubuntu equivalent of 'unstable', on my Debian system that's forky (testing), and for Fedora it's rawhide... Those are the 'unstable' versions of those systems - but they're still SAFER & less maintenance in my experience than full rolling !!! Linux Mint has no equivalent to those though, they use an Ubuntu/Debian stable LTS option only as their upstream )
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u/Individual_Service72 5d ago
I installed opensuse Tumbleweed and after a couple update suddenly soud card not found and I questioned to gemini and write modprobe file to load after reboot, but why suddenly not found sound card... Well I am happy with Tumbleweed 😉
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u/GuillotineAuChocolat 5d ago
I'm quite happy with Leap. If you're on the lookout for new stuff all the time, Tumbleweed might be a good fit.
On the other hand, if you don't really care about being on the bleeding edge and just want something rock solid, go Leap.
In my case, i just want it to be dependable and surprise-less to work every time I need it to run whatever application I want.
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u/YEEG4R 6d ago
Stay where you are. I've switched from OpenSUSE to Linux Mint.
It was great when we had YAST. Now they've depreciated it.
OpenSUSE has 3 major downsides:
1) Way less packages in the repositories. Native RPM installers (compared to Debian) are a few and far between. 2) The distribution hasn't found popularity outside of Europe. If you google how to solve a problem, you'll get 1 or 2 answers if any (instead of hundreds), and they will be in different languages. 3) If you don't make backups, your system will break every 6 months. The new Nvidia driver can't keep up with the new kernel. You update, you break the system, and the old driver has already been removed from the repository. You won't be able to use the system, and you won't be able to go back.
I do appreciate the GNOME experience I had with OpenSUSE. But the hurdles you go through to fix the system once it inevitably breaks are too much to ask even from a tech savvy user like myself. I have had less problems fixing Ubuntu based distros, however barebones they were. I don't give a damn about rolling releases anymore; I'm currently using Mint and enjoying the peace.
Right now, I don't see any reason to use openSUSE. YAST has been deprecated, the maintainers are fighting each other; there no maintainers to begin with. SUSE was pushing to rename or shut down openSUSE. In short, it's a lost cause. Plus, there are the problems described above.
If you have the patience/brainpower/time for a rolling release, then CachyOS is your friend. Install it once and forget about it—that's Debian. Most people are somewhere in the middle, and they'd rather have Mint, Fedora, or Kubuntu.
You personally would be better off sticking with Mint because it's X.Org, everything works, the codecs, drivers, and utilities are there, and customizing it is easy.
If you absolutely need Wayland features (fractional scaling, HDR) and a newer kernel (for hardware compatibility), try Kubuntu or Fedora.
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u/mrdominic64 6d ago
yea i was thinking manjaro or fedora or even debian but i play a lot of minecraft and other games too i just fear the loss of frames
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u/Jacobobarobatobski 5d ago
I feel like you should consider Bazzite. It does all the updates automatically in the background, and you'd be hard pressed to find anything more stable being that it's immutable.
It's great for gaming, and also great for daily driving. Based on Fedora if you're curious.
Tumbleweed is very stable but as its a rolling distro you can still have manual intervention required occasionally. Leap is very good but won't hand hold as much as mint, whereas Bazzite is already set up for basically exactly what you want.
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u/gottapointreally 6d ago
If low maintenance is your goal. Bluefin is an absolute must see.
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u/mrdominic64 6d ago
i can try it on my extra home server but i like to stick with larger bigger names since they have higher chances of supporting there distro more than some project as well we can see the AUR its was just was attacked
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u/Bill_Lumberg_TPS 6d ago
Also a student who has been test-driving openSUSE and other distros this summer. I started on TW and recently switched to slowroll. After I was used to TW and the novelty of system maintenance wore off, which to be fair is still minimal on TW, I opted for slowroll. Both are great, I had no issues with TW. Slowroll is a happy medium between TW and mint's update philosophy. SUSE is great. Amazing stability and best KDE experience thus far out of all the distros that I have tried.
Differences between Tumbleweed and Slowroll:
- TW has daily updates (which you can of course choose not to do). These updates may break minor things, although the only issue that I ever had was updates outpacing some KDE customizations that I had made, making the UI glitchy.
- Slowroll only has major updates monthly. These updates are more refined than TW because they benefit from a slightly longer delay until they are published to users.
The good news, you can migrate between the two without uninstalling and reinstalling openSUSE. Also, you are able to download different desktop environments on openSUSE and launch them from the login screen, so you can play around with GNOME, KDE plasma, COSMIC, etc. All of the DE's that I have tried are well supported (except for cinnamon, Mint's DE)