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Input lag is decreased, believe it or not.
I have no way to test it, but my credibility is that I play rhythm games like Guitar Hero at a high level and I play on Linux to avoid input lag and audio lag. Windows 10 has horrendous input lag compared to previous versions of Windows, even if you use fullscreen.
I use an XFCE install of openSUSE 15 as my primary OS, with the proprietary nVidia drivers (390.77) from nVidia's openSUSE repository.
I immediately noticed that it was much easier to KBD on keyboard with WASD as Bryan as soon as I booted up the game and jumped into the lab.
In openSUSE KDE is not the red headed stepchild like it is with either Ubuntu or Fedora. The best move you will ever make in Linux is getting away from the Ubuntu world. I have never been able to figure out the attraction for those who like Ubuntu. Instead of stock openSUSE I would look at Gecko Linux, which is openSUSE with extra codecs and a lot of rough edges sanded off. My particular favorite fix is keeping SUSE from loading unwanted packages over and over again. Gecko offers every version that openSUSE does and a couple of extra DE's too. As far as trying to emulate Windows, why? I think you will find that KDE, and pretty much all Linux DE's, are superior to the crap that Microsoft has been pushing for so long. The real beauty of Linux is that you can tailor the environment to your preferences and not have to do things the way someone else tells you to. Start moving elements of your environment around and find out what you prefer. I guarantee that Windows is not a superior way of doing things. People just get used to it and think it is OK. When you finally get KDE configured to your personal taste you will laugh at the silliness of Windows. One thing that KDE can do that I find very useful is the ability to put window controls at either the left or the right (or both in my case) top corners. I would go with something where you can get at least Plasma 5.8 as there have been a lot of improvements recently. Go with a rolling release so that you can keep up to date. Gecko Rolling Plasma is a good choice.
Personally I've never liked just how much setup is required to get a fresh OpenSUSE install to the same usability/friendliness as say, Ubuntu or Mint. Geckolinux is going a long way to fixing that though.
I also wish there was a more polished Software Manager/Centre, similar to Mint's. The standard one is similar to Synaptic, which while usable, isn't very good for discovering new software.
Having to put in a password to open Yast is a bit annoying, as you generally have to put in your password again with whatever you select from Yast, such as the update tool (Which I also wish was more like Mint's, in interface).
Those are pretty much my biggest complaints, and if they ever get remidied, I'd absolutely switch back to OpenSUSE, as some of the other benefits it offers like the OBS are absolutely awesome.
JIC you haven't heard of it, Gecko is a downstream distro you might also be interested in.
I had issues with the way openSUSE groups its desktop packages, and Gecko addresses this.
I've personally had hit-or-miss experiences upgrading Ubuntu installs to newer versions. I generally just re-install now.
Since you want to stick with Cinnamon but don't want to re-install the OS, I'd recommend taking a look at the Fedora Cinnamon spin, or GeckoLinux Rolling Cinnamon Edition.
What about GeckoLinux? https://geckolinux.github.io/
All the good stuff from openSUSE without the hassle for new Linux users. Otherwise, there is Linux Mint KDE, but I don't know about their KDE integration.
If you want a live iso, you can build your self in SUSE studio or download a openSUSE derivative, however mind it's not official openSUSE.
A good derivative is GeckoLinux.
To prepare a usb stick from an iso image run:
sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M
Short Answer: Install Gecko Linux (openSUSE derivative). Long answer: You can install openSUSE Leap, but you may run into some restrictions regarding media codecs and some font configurations. Granted, you can solve the codec issue by just adding the 'Packman' repo. But if you want something that fixed these issues for you and 'just works'...Gecko Linux.
I'll second Tumbleweed but if you want to try it out without installing, check out GeckoLinux Rolling. It also has a few tweaks for desktops already applied and a slightly more relaxed attitude to non-free software.
I'd recommend checking out the unofficial OpenSUSE Leap guide here, it address some of your questions.
I'd say the distro is appropriate for novice users, but requires a bit of setup to get things like multimedia codecs working. (Just adding a repository and knowing which packages to add, which is covered in the guide I just linked.)
A distro called Gecko Linux is basically OpenSUSE with the legwork of setting up codecs and tweaking WI-Fi configuration for a more out of the box experience already done.
Steam works well, and is installed like any other package, but skype is pretty much broken in my experience (actually, I've never got it working on any Linux distro).
I can't speak to the design philosophy, as I'm relatively new to the distro.
One unique thing about the SUSE family of distros is that they have some fantastic configuration tools in the form of YAST2, which is analogous to the windows control panel, but much more powerful (and complex). One sub-tool of YAST, called snapper, is similar to windows system restore points in functionality.
With snapper, whenever you install a package it creates a snapshot. If something breaks, you can boot from it. This effectively means that you'll never have a broken system due to new software. You can also compare snapshots with each other or the running system, which is great for troubleshooting.
I'm sure someone who's more familiar with OpenSUSE can give you a better rundown, but those are my favorite points.
Edit: Broke up my wall of text into paragraphs.
> OpenSUSE but it's not perfect. For legal reasons, some important things (codecs and good font rendering) are not installed by default. You can install them manually, but it's a bit of a pain and I wouldn't suggest OpenSUSE for complete Linux beginners.
Just use this.
KDE is at least as light on memory as xfce. It's developers put alot of time into optimising it's memory usage and even the XFCE guys admit they just don't have the same level of resources. I use Opensuse KDE on a 2GB laptop, no problems.
That said, check out Gecko's xfce spin. It's pretty nice and just a customized opensuse.
Short answer: yes, go with Leap.
Tumbleweed is fantastic but requires some experience and because of the very frequent and huge updates it is requiring a lot of bandwidth.
If you accept the defaults, the install process is straightforward.
Yast, the GUI admin tool is feature richer than what you have on Mint.
However you're going to run an industrial grade distro and sometimes this requires more understanding of what you're doing.
Here is an unofficial but very good guide, consider it as a primer.
The official documentation is the openSUSE bible.
As an alternative, there's a derivative, Geckolinux which takes a number of decisions on your behalf and smooths some rough edges.
So how do you run a modern KDE?
- /r/linux says of Kubuntu that it "has the worst integration".
- KDE Neon only just became stable and then immediately had some kind of security issue. Irrespective of personal anecdotes it needs to mature for a while.
- Arch and derivatives are for Arch maintainers, not users.
Debian Testing? I don't think I've run plain Debian, and I should try, but it seems like there's QoL improvements in Ubuntu I'd miss. openSUSE Tumbleweed? It has behaviours I know I'd despise but they can be disabled either manually or indirectly via GeckoLinux.
I usually recommend openSUSE with a light weight environment in such a case, but if you want to try it live, without installing have a look at GeckoLinux I would suggest the static version with the LxQt or Xfce desktops. Should you prefer to stay with the Ubuntu family tree, have a look at LinuxLiteOS which uses Xfce as its desktop.
Continuing from what Gabriel said, whilst openSUSE is quite different from Mint, something like Geckolinux might ease the transition, as it's essentially the Linux Mint of openSUSE. You'd still be able to learn the all different ins and outs of how things are done in SUSE, but with a similar environment to Mint.
Just thought I'd mention it. :)
I haven't seen anyone mention Gecko Linux yet. It's Opensuse with some customization out of the box. I like it.
Yast is great, but you don't have to use it for anything. You can do anything on the console, or use Yast. It just provides a more standard interface since it's identical via GUI or console (ncurses).
I prefer that to hunting around for whatever package is being recommended for configuring a firewall or something else I don't do often.
If you're interested in linux try it, may consider Gecko Linux for out of the box codecs. The best distro is the one you like, but if you try opensuse and dislike it i'd recommend you to try Mint.
There is a spin called Gecko Linux (no relation haha) which provides several light weight live images with a particular DE. I use it with XFCE on my old computers which I really like. Plus it uses the standard repositories so you'll get all the updates as OpenSuSE puts them out. It is really trimmed down though, so you may have to install a number of normally preinstalled packages you use regularly.
I couldn't figure out how to customize XFCE, and liking one of the provided preconfigured customizations anyways I didn't put much effort into it lol. But all of the images are live images so you can just throw them on a flash drive and try each one out, then use the provided calamares installer to install it to disk.
I'd check GeckoLinux Rolling too: https://geckolinux.github.io . It seems to be basically Tumbleweed with some additional polish made to ready-of-the-boxiness, like proprietary codecs and better font config. Like what Mint is to Ubuntu. I've used openSUSE only myself but based on the info from website GeckoLinux seems promising.
Gecko does a number of things to streamline installing. But once you've installed you're basically running opensuse! There aren't any gecko specific repos like with mint being based on ubuntu and mint using their own repos.
Personally I wanted to learn so I installed opensuse and then found myself doing basically what gecko does for you. If I were to reinstall for any reason I would probably use gecko this time around.
You can read on the geckolinux website the section titled: "How is this different from opensuse" to see exactly what is different. Although atleast for my tumbleweed install some of those things weren't so relevant. The font rendering seemed fine on tumbleweed and it also has live cds. As for the patterns I haven't run into problems, but I also haven't tried to slim down the installation by uninstalling some of the default programs that come with it, which is where he ran into that problem I assume.
The main selling points are the preconfigured packman repository with the relevant packages for proprietary media codecs preinstalled and live cds for leap so you can try it out without installing, at least in my opinion.
> Worst out-of-the-box font rendering and media support
>>Yeah I don't think there's that much we can do.
If you're really interested in fixing this issue, I would suggest speaking with /u/sb56637, who is the creator of GeckoLinux, an openSUSE spin-off using SUSE Studio. He was able to achieve excellent font-rendering out of the box with his configuration, which I assume openSUSE could easily adopt. :)
Yeah, Zorin is cool. It is constructed of GNOME 3 elements, with custom extensions the Zorin brothers made.
If you want to KDE Neon, I'd suggest an awesome spin of that called Maui
If you want to give openSUSE a try, look at Gecko Linux, which will give you a Live CD/USB boot installer. Gecko comes with all the codecs and non-free proprietary drivers for full hardware support.
As for the others, Antergos is a cool installer for the Arch system. Likely to require Linux experience when some rolling update hits and breaks the system. PCLinuxOS is rolling, but more stable than Arch-based offerings.
If you want something that's especially stable, you may want to look into GeckoLinux, which is a quite good spin-off of openSUSE, but designed with the desktop user in mind. It offers a wide variety of desktops, including Gnome.
Solus is quite good, as it attempts to be as easy and simple to use as Ubuntu, but with a rolling release. It's a very slick distro, and the Budgie desktop is quite nice as well.
Apricity is based off Arch, so it can be unstable if you don't know what you're doing. It's a good distro though, so no harm in giving it a shot if you like the look/idea of it. :)
Fedora is a fine Distro, but each release is only supported for 6 months, requiring you to upgrade via DNF, which can be somewhat annoying if it fails.
Mainly it's the reliability of openSUSE that is so impressive. I'm running Tumbleweed, the rolling release, and in the almost six months that I've been running it there have been only two update issues. Leap must be absolutely solid, given that it's the standard release and like Ubuntu, Debian and Red Hat only gets the required security and bug fix updates.
- An NTP update that slowed the boot process down. It was rolled back within 24 hours.
- A problem with a mis-packaged set of codecs for VLC. This actually came from an add-on repository and could safely be ignored by using the out dated ones.
Purely subjectively, it feels faster and smoother than Kubuntu and objectively, the internal temperature is ~4C lower than when running Kubuntu.
The biggest downside to openSUSE for someone considering it is the lack of installable live media. I've never found any from openSUSE themselves, but there is Gecko Linux which does provide them. It doesn't change that much from the standard install.
Hmm...I'd think you can get under the hood on pretty much any Distro, but if you want something that you can get up-and-running quickly, but still encourages tinkering around a lot, I'd recommend Antergos.
It's based on Arch Linux (which usually requires you to manually install the OS, one piece at a time), but instead provides a GUI installer like most other user-friendly distros.
With Antergos, you'd have access to the AUR (A huge community driven repository), the Arch Wiki (Massively well documented manual for everything), and it would be rolling, meaning you get the latest software, and theoretically would never need to reinstall the OS ever again.
I personally don't use Arch based stuff, as I always found it kind of annoying installing stuff. There's a lot of interruption prompts when installing, asking you if you want to do various things or stop the installation. It gives you a lot of power over exactly how you install stuff, but I never utilized it myself.
I personally use GeckoLinux at the moment. :)
Which one did you prefer within Mint and Manjaro?
It Mint then Leap, if Manjaro then Tumbleweed.
There's also GeckoLinux, which offers both Leap based and Tumbleweed based derivatives. It smooths a few rough at th cost of taking a number of decisions on behalf of its users.
If you want a great, stable experience, try OpenSuse Leap.
If you want the best experience, with minimal work on you're part, try the opensuse Gecko re-spin. I like the "plasma" KDE one.
Because opensuse endorses the dvd and not the smaller livecd images.
You can decrease your bandwidth consumption by doing a netinstall instead, but obviously you forfeit the ability to try the current livecd (considered broken or incomplete).
Geckolinux distributes smaller iso images with live boot capability for different DEs, which may make a more seamless starting point if you need images that can be tried offline.
1st question you should be asking is what Desktop Enviroment (DE) should you use. This is how you interact with your distro, the front end. Coming from Windows, Cinnamon or Plasma (aka KDE) is you best options and will feel familiar. Beginner distros are generally "stable" (Long Term Service) distros. There are less updates and it's generally easier to get stuff working and/or fix.
Linux Mint is Ubuntu LTS (Distro) with Cinnamon (DE) this is my favourite. Open Suse Leap (distro) with either Plasma or Cinnamon is another great choice. Mint is the easiest to install, you can click install along side Windows and it's done.
There's a program call Ventoy that lets you put more than 1 bootable ISO on a usb. There's also a program called timeshift, it makes backups and is very user friendly. Keep a copy of live USB around like Mint so you can fix/restore from a backup. Suse doesn't have a live USB but Gecko Linux Static is a live USB. Gecko Linux Static = Open Suse Leap.
In my experience, OpenSuse has the best hardware support. That being said, there are an awful lot of wifi devices that are terrible with linux.
You can try the bootable verision of Gecko Linux, which is just OpenSuse with some customizations. That should tell you if it works better.
Anything that uses Pantheon and its related apps in general.
ElementaryOS (devs behind Pantheon)
Geckolinux (custom install media for opensuse with saner, userfriendlier defaults). NEXT installer fetches and updates packages from Leap's upstream with extra repos, Rolling are bandwidth-hungry rolling releases a macos exilee might be averse to.
I would suggest geckolinux.github.io/ . Its is opensuse with some non-free codecs and printer support . also it is just 1.3 gb or something and you get a sleek non bloated Tumbleweed experience . I have a similar use case and i wont install every update tho , check openSUSE Tumbleweed Review | Summarized data about the changes and stability of Tumbleweed snapshots. and decide weather you want to install the update or not based on their stability ratings .
in Tumbleweed Updates are coming as distribution upgrades . you may get three to four updates a week and you can decide weather to install it or not based on its rating on openSUSE Tumbleweed Review | Summarized data about the changes and stability of Tumbleweed snapshots. We don't really update individual packages using Yast or any GUI , all we do is zypper dup (and you can lockup packages using zypper and .confs - see documentation ) . I would suggest you to try Gecko linux rolling (small iso with all necessary packages and non-free codecs and drivers ) by installing it to a small partition and see your self .
What? No! Not at all -- indeed I have the XFCE GeckoLinux version of Leap 15.1 on a desktop in the office. The "rolling" (i.e. Tumbleweed-based) ISOs seem to be updated once a month or so, I think.
Personally, I like the changes the creator made from base openSUSE. GeckoLinux has visibly better font rendering, an easier installer, uses a more familiar filesystem layout (traditional ext4, separate /home if you have enough space) than openSUSE, and so on. But it preserves my favourite openSUSE feature: YaST.
When I was waiting for the 15.1 release to come along, the maintainer was helpful and quick to respond, too.
I personally find package patterns problematic, it's one of the reason Geckolinux might have worked better for new users as a starting point than pure opensuse. I was actually the same os with different defaults and extra convenience preinstalled, not unlike how Mint is to Ubuntu - a more polished experience out of the box.
if you want a simplified version of Suse, like Manjaro for Arch, I suggest looking into GeckoLinux, it provides everything great about Suse with an easy to use installer and friendly UI experience. https://geckolinux.github.io
I had Tumbleweed for just some hours, and was a really bad experience with Plasma. Maybe is the DE, but yast was in conflict with Plasma, and the wi-fi never worked well. I want try Gecko at next https://geckolinux.github.io/
I loved Solus for a year, then i switched to Fedora 30, and i really enjoying it. I have Pop_OS on a laptop, but not sure to keep it. Hard to find the right distro for a laptop.
openSUSE is a huge pita, if you're set on it check out the optimized version called https://geckolinux.github.io/. i personally prefer Antergos as it has the best default KDE layout of all Arch spins, but KDE Neon is also a good choice if you want an Ubuntu LTS base
OpenSUSE is very internet friendly as the set up tool (YaST = Yet Another setup tool) has all the things you need in one place. Unfortunately it is NOT available as a Live Linux distro , although a Live Linux version slightly modified is available from their Derivatives GeckoLinux https://geckolinux.github.io/ which gives both static (stable) and other versions. Good way to try OpenSUSE.
If you are using the open source nouveau graphics driver and are happy with it you may want to explore rock solid openSUSE as an alternative rolling release to Solus. Gecko Linux is a very nice spin of oepnSUSE. Try Gecko Rolling here.
If you require a liveCD of openSUSE, you could instead try GeckoLinux, which is an openSUSE derivative created using SUSE Studio. It offers LiveCD's with various DE's. :)
The official release is here: https://software.opensuse.org/422/en
It is installer-only. The community made the active choice to focus on the installer vs. installer plus live DVD.
You can install from DVD... with the DVD iso (which is what I do... I've got a DVD RW laying around for this).
Alternatively, you can use GeckoLinux https://geckolinux.github.io/ which is a full openSUSE Leap/Tumbleweed with a few of the convenience factors rolled in (multimedia codecs included, Packman repo preconfigured etc). I believe the "testdrive" download is a LiveDVD/ISO build.
There is also Gecko Linux which is basically openSUSE with all the codecs and optimizations that you will want already added. It uses the openSUSE repositories and is available in every flavor that open SUSE offers with a couple of extra DE's that SUSE does not officially support (Cinnamon and Budgie). I dual booted Arch and openSUSE for several months last year and the thing that I found the most annoying about openSUSE is YAST's insistence on reinstalling packages that you have explicitly removed (just my personal observation, but it seems to especially concentrate on packages that break things LOL). Gecko claims to have fixed this. If you are interested in openSUSE you should look at Gecko. If I had any drive space available I would play with it myself. Maybe I'll get a new hard drive for Christmas. Sabayon is worth looking at too.
I would personally recommend openSUSE tumbleweed over Fedora, and more specifically, GeckoLinux.
Fedora is not known for being exceedingly stable, and it is not a rolling distribution (so, similar to Ubuntu).
openSUSE Tumbleweed on the other hand is touted as the 'stable' rolling distro. Everything is tested throughly before being released, and it seems to work rather well.
GeckoLinux is a spin-off of openSISE that attempts to make the out-of-the-box experience more pleasant by having things like media codecs and the like pre-installed.
Alternatively, you could look into Newt OS as well, which is also an offshoot of openSUSE.
Arch (and it's offshoots like Antergos and Manjaro) is generally pretty stable, but you have to know what you're doing, and it can require a lot tinkering.
The reason Manjaro interests me is because it isn't base arch xP
Specifically, its driver installer and package manager are appealing. And it offers virtually every DE in the form of community spins :)
It was pretty much a toss-up between that, or Geckolinux.
On top of that, there is a nice spin-off of openSUSE that attempts to make it more user-friendly out of the box, called GeckoLinux. I figured it might interest you. :)
Good luck!
Actually I'm gonna confess...
This isn't OpenSUSE, this is Gecko
It's pretty much like OpenSUSE but with the things it doesn't have but in a smaller .iso size (mine was around 900ish Mb)
I think openSUSE is a great distro, but it tends to have a few little niggling problems that have to be dealt with before it's up to the standard of other distros out of the box. Like installing media codecs, which can be a bit of a pain.
Personally, I think the rather unknown openSUSE spin-off distros are far more interesting and appealing, like GeckoLinux and Newt OS.
They attempt to make OpenSUSE as nice to use as possible right out of the gate, similar to what Korora does for Fedora.
I would put openSUSE (and especially its spinoffs) within my top 3 major distros, alongside Manjaro and Solus. But that's just my 0.02 cents. :)
>I have to disagree: on Opensuse I have to add third-party repositories to enable good font rendering, to have installable mp3 codecs/etc, *and Nvidia drivers.
Hopefully GeckoLinux and Newt OS catch on then, as they attempt to resolve these issues. :)
I suppose you could test to see how well Steam installs and works. Some distros can have trouble with that without modification.
Could also test how well the pre-installed GUI package manager works, especially if it's unique to that distro (stuff like the Deepin Store).
And if you're looking for interesting distros to review, I'd recommend GeckoLinux, and Newt OS. :)
It's not clear to me what you're looking for, however:
Cinnamon is a GTK3 DE;
you can find it almost in every distro, as official DE or available;
if you do not want Ubuntu/Min, there's Debian, Fedora or its derivative Korora;
as an openSUSE guy, I like GeckoLinux, which brings a polished Cinnamon edition based on the rock solid commercial grade core Leap 42.1.
Leap seems to be in-between Debian and Fedora as far as how new the packages are.
Tumbleweed is, as other have said, great if you use Open Source GPU drivers.
If you use an Nvidia card (and you will, if you plan on gaming a lot), you might also consider Geckolinux, which is kinda like the Linux Mint of openSUSE. It's based off Leap, so GPU drivers will play nice, but it has a default configuration more oriented for the average desktop user, instead of business users. It also comes pre-installed with all the codecs you'll need, which is very convenient.
Just something to consider.