Rolling with Tumbleweed

It started when this random video appeared in my feed. I am aware of openSUSE before but this SUSE parody video made me hop into this distro immediately. I am not aware that it offers both static (Leap) and rolling release (Tumbleweed) model. Not being in a rolling release for awhile now, I decided to roll down this path. The offline installer surprised me with a 4.6 GB ISO, which is quite big than typical size.

The reason for that big ISO file is the install process. It will let you customize your installation by selecting the packages that you want or remove. It is the most powerful installer so far which let you tweak a lot of things. In the disk partition section, the default filesystem is btrfs. Prior to installation, I have no idea about this filesystem. It is apparently the default for openSUSE for quite awhile and first to adopt it. This new information made me more excited since I have a new thing to delve into. More about btrfs here.

I tried KDE Plasma this time. I already used other major desktop environments but for some reason, I always overlooked Plasma. After some learning more about it, reading the documentation, checking the source, engaging with the community, the innovation, etc., I can say that I will stick with it for a long time, I like everything about it. The same can be said about openSUSE. It’s the current perfect match for me.

Two months in, I can say that I found that distro. Everything from the logo, wiki, forums, community, and the different ways of how it handles things is in my alley. Using Linux has been fun again for me after dabbling most of my time in Debian, Ubuntu and Arch based distros. I’m also using it with Wayland and PipeWire which seems to work fine with my current use.

It’s crazy how this journey started with a parody video. I know openSUSE don’t make a lot of noise in the Linux community, hence the small userbase but in some sense, I quite like it that way. I haven’t gone into detail about the features of openSUSE, I’ll let you have fun discovering about it.

“Don’t reboot it, just patch!”