Goodbye Arch & hello OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
Recently, there was a discussion on omg.lol'ers about which good Linux distros are worth trying, and someone during the discussion mentioned Fedora Sway. So, I decided to overwrite my lovely Arch & Hyprland install on my Dell laptop, and install Fedora, which ultimately led me to installing openSUSE Tumbleweed.
I started off with installing the Fedora Sway edition, and I have to say it mostly just works, and as a bonus it doesn't have a garish colour scheme (here's looking at you, Manjaro!). But after using it for 48 hours, I felt too constricted with the guardrails/distro decisions that they put in place—to be clear, all distros will, to a certain extent, put guardrails in place. For example, I wasn't able to use systemd-boot, nor systemd-networkd. The power management out of the box really did not work well with my Dell laptop. I also wanted my regular dopamine hit with regular updates to Linux apps much like I had with Arch, so I realised quite soon that I really did want to continue using a rolling release distro. Fedora, I believe (happy to be corrected), updates their distro twice a year, and I think that Fedora 42 is coming out in a couple of months.
Therefore, I decided to give openSUSE Tumbleweed a try. I'm officially smitten. Sensible defaults out of the box, and power management works well—no, that's a lie, it works really well. They also recently introduced SELinux as a new default, rather than AppArmor, and they're also trying to get systemd-boot to replace GRUB. Nice. They seem to be relatively forward-thinking, which is always appreciated.
I only really ran into trouble when I was trying to get openSUSEway installed as part of the default ISO install. It turned out to be trickier than I anticipated, to say the least. I tried (re)installing openSUSE Tumbleweed 3-4 times before just deciding to install the base server, and then installing openSUSEway package only after I'd logged in, and that was the way through this. Since then though, it's worked rock solid.
Since installing it, I've of course changed the colour scheme to be something light, which is what I simply prefer. Kudos to those that prefer a darker theme, but for me it needs to be a light theme, and that's just how I roll. Oh, did I tell you I've discovered flatpaks for the first time? Yeah, I was a bit behind the times.
I've installed Obsidian, Discord, Halloy IRC client, Chrome, and a whole bunch of other flatpak apps. Flatpak works well, from what I've seen so far. I installed Chrome, as it seems to still have the best video out-of-the-box experience that I could find. I watch a lot of YouTube, so this is important to me. I like how easy it is to update the flatpak apps—simply flatpak update and you're done.
I was talking to someone about openSUSE and why I used it, and I commented that it simply got out of my way, and let me get on with doing what I need to do. I had a scary (to me) thought a day or two ago; I could probably get away with not having my MacBookPro, and simply just using openSUSE on this laptop. I already use it for 85% of my daily use, but alas this is still a work laptop, so I need to save up and buy myself a Lenovo laptop.
Things that I wish I had done differently during my install? Hmm, only one and that's setting encryption on my nvme drive straight from the start. It's not a biggie, as this laptop never really leaves the house, but it would have been nice. I deferred against this, as I simply did not want yet another password to type in during boot process. It can be a bit tricky to find individual packages that I want to have installed via Zypper—it's not as easy as finding packages on the Arch website.
On the whole I have to say I'm really happy with openSUSE Tumbleweed, so the original idea of trying Fedora was not a bad suggestion, as it got me out doing a small distro-hop away from Arch, and finding a new Linux home. There are times that I miss the simplicity of Arch but I'll get used to how things are in this world, and it's also given me the opportunity to think about trying flatpaks, and I'm sure many more new things along the way. So, perhaps doing a small distro-hop is a way to learn about new technologies that you might not think about. So, now you've got your distro-hopping hallpass from me, go and try a new distro, and see what you learn!