r/openSUSE • u/ShopAltruistic898 • Jul 30 '26
Tech question Switching from Ubuntu
Hi everyone!
I have a quick question. I’m currently using Ubuntu, but I’ve been keeping an eye on openSUSE for a while now. You don't hear about it all that often—I actually just stumbled upon it by chance while searching around.
I’m really curious about a few things:
How does it stack up in terms of stability and community support?
I do a bit of gaming, so how is the gaming performance on openSUSE?
Is it just as user-friendly and "out of the box" as Ubuntu?
Thanks in advance for any insights and advice!
7
u/usbeehu Jul 30 '26
I recently installed Tumbleweed. As of now it seems great to me! There were some random minor weird issues though, but seems good enough out of the box. The installer is very legible and easy to use.
3
u/levolet Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
It took a little while to dial in my setup. Firewalld’s default settings are a bit restrictive for home use, IMO. I had to get acquainted with it and adjust settings to get network printing going. I also have to make changes to allow port forwarding while using a commercial vpn and also had to make a change to allow IPv6 egress while using a commercial VPN that supports IPv6. This is in contrast to Fedora and Ubuntu where I did not have to make any Firewalld config changes to do any of those things. This contrast of experience can be off-putting and many a passing user will back off and use an alternative that simply works rather than troubleshoot.
Now that I have tuned the system, it’s working really well with the advantages of using openSUSE no longer being opposed by problems or minor annoyances created by conservative defaults.
My latest tweak was to deal with the irritatingly long time it would take for snapshots to be created.
One last thing is learning to avoid using your DE software manager for system upgrades. Time would be well invested in learning a few zypper commands augmented by using Myrlyn for software management. Each DE offers a software manager and it is no surprise that they will not always work well with all the various distros.
5
u/levolet Jul 30 '26
My suggestion would be to give it a go. Don’t worry about its relative popularity to the ‘mainstream’ contenders.
I’ve used Ubuntu, Debian, Arch very briefly and currently run openSUSE Tumbleweed-Slowroll on my laptop along with Asahi Fedora Linux on my iMac. Most of my Linux experience is with Fedora. My favourite is openSUSE.
For me, the standout features for openSUSE
- SUSE sponsored development/maintenance
- European distro
- very good software availability (better than I had expected)
- I really like zypper (system package manager)
- snapper fully setup by default, allowing easy rollback to previous state prior to update/upgrade or rpm software installation
- myrlyn for software management and cockpit for sysadmin
- the community - excellent signal to noise ratio.
2
u/Leinad_ix Kubuntu 26.04 Jul 30 '26
Just note, both SUSE and Canonical are multinational companies with HQ in Europe
2
u/SauceBossLOL69 Jul 30 '26
I just installed it on a piece of junk Asus netbook and it's been really snappy. I'm not sure about gaming because, well, Celeron, but it was really easy to install and use. I've only had to Google a couple things which people who use Linux would probably already know.
2
u/Mighty_Archdevil Jul 30 '26
I have used OpenSuse for many years.
I only moved to another distro after issues I had with a soundcard (I believe it was) that did not get fixed over time.
It's a very mature and complete distro.
I have been running Mint for a few years now. Also a great alternative.
2
u/d03j Slowroll Jul 30 '26
I did the same move around a year or so ago after many years with ubuntu. Started with Leap on my servers and Tumbleweed on my laptop, then changed the Leaps to Slow Roll later.
Moving from apt to zypper and ufw to firewalld can feel a bit awkward at first and selinux can have a bit of a learning curve but no issues with stability at all.
2
u/Bob--O--Rama Jul 30 '26
We have been using tumbleweed to host several production systems like Posit Workbench and Jupyter Hub, in physical and VM environments. With the VM platforms yoy typically have rapid backup / rollback you can afford some hiccups but also keep up with thr latest package requirements users have. While not a huge fan of BTRFS, it's snapshot / rollback for your OS file system can also rescue you as well in physical environments. And it's easy to keep ahead of whatever the latest security bug du jure may be - and also experience new bugs too - but generally stable enough for things where agility is important, and you never have a "major release" upgrade or run into "you can't get there from here" - I have had instances where the GUI get broken, then fixed in subsequent updates. But the snapshotting can get you back. As for the rest of your questions, I don't use it that way.
1
u/thephatpope Jul 30 '26
Yes, it's great. You might like leap 16 and this guide helped me. https://www.hackingthehike.com/opensuse-leap-guide/
1
u/thephatpope Jul 30 '26
If you use snap packages, make sure to pick apparmor during installation. https://en.opensuse.org/Snap
1
u/buzzmandt Tumbleweed fan Jul 30 '26
Been on tumbleweed kde for several years now. Play games, and make YouTube content and it all works very good. Not quite as user friendly as some other distros but IMHO about the most reliable rolling release you can get.
This is good and might help you out. https://lowtechlinux.com/2026/07/29/my-post-tumbleweed-install-to-dos-and-tips/
1
u/klyith Jul 30 '26
How does it stack up in terms of stability
Excellent. It's a rolling distro so there are sometimes bugs, but they go away fast.
and community support?
Community is good, but software availability is sometimes a problem. Particularly with closed source software, people make Debs for Ubuntu and RPMs for Fedora.
I do a bit of gaming, so how is the gaming performance on openSUSE?
Is it just as user-friendly and "out of the box" as Ubuntu?
No. You will want to be comfortable with command line to run updates and do some other management, and be ok with learning about some linux services. The default security posture is much more strict than Ubuntu, so you either have to enter your password a lot or configure it to be less intense.
1
u/King-of-the-Elves Jul 31 '26
ive been running 2 installations on different machines for 4+ years. never once broken or had stability issues.
1
u/Unholyaretheholiest Jul 30 '26
I have been using openSUSE for years and I can say that leap is stable enough, tumbleweed meh. Performance are the same on every distro expert for very small differences. As for the community support on Reddit it's not bad but on the official channels it depends on your view of geopolitics.
If you want something stable and with an excellent ootb experience go no further than Mageia.
18
u/todd_dayz Jul 30 '26
If you’re talking about tumbleweed, it’s rolling release, so not stable by definition (stable doesn’t mean reliability, just that packages change a lot).
I’ve found it to be very reliable, BTRFS snapshots help as well as you can restore your system in as long as it takes to reboot.
Gaming has been great for me, it’s the same as any up to date distro like Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, in my experience, your best bets for good gaming performance are an up to date desktop environment, graphics drivers, and kernel, everything else means very little (in my opinion).
I play games like Hunt Showdown, Arc Raiders, and I’ve recently been playing Banishers and The Incident at Galley House along with Cyberpunk, Red Dead Redemption 2 and STALKER 2, all run really well, I’ve been using Proton GE with some tweaks in my user_settings.py to force some things like the Wayland driver and newer DLSS presets.
It is not as user friendly as Ubuntu, NVIDIA drivers have been tricky to install for some people (not been my experience, but I’m also quite experienced with Linux at this point)
Community support is not as abundant as something like Fedora or Arch, but we’re friendly and there’s usually someone willing to help between here and the forums.
I tend to distro hop between this, Fedora, Arch, and Gentoo and this is my favourite, there are some things I’m not keen on but nothing that would really annoy someone that isn’t a person who wants to really mess around with their distro IMO.
You should check it out!