I didn’t really like that Aurora and Bazzite were moving their main discussions from Discourse to places like Reddit, Discord, and Github (the three sites deep into their villain arcs). At least Bazzite kept Discourse open for other users to help users, while Aurora set it to read only. That gave me the ick and I decided it was time to change my distro, yet again.
I get that Github is used for developer stuff and it makes sense…I just didn’t want to sign away my soul and likely have my posts scrapped by LLM bots. General discussions being moved there was a strange choice, the desire for proper forums reignited within me…I chose openSUSE Tumbleweed. Now, previously I had a lot of issues and failed getting that distro installed because it was in a rough state last year when they pushed major updates to both Leap and Tumbleweed.
It wouldn’t even boot into the installer proper, failed to connect to openSUSE’s repos necessary to install the operating system when using net install. However, I used a different USB Image Writing software and made super sure that everything was above the board before trying to install openSUSE Tumbleweed this morning. As I don’t like giving up, I decided to give openSUSE Tumbleweed that fourth chance.
Surprisingly, it was a fast and easy as any other distro. Sane defaults, it picked the right drive right out the gate, quickly allowed me to make all the user choices that were necessary for me to proceed. Letting it rip took probably around 15 minutes for openSUSE Tumbleweed to install. Having chosen KDE (the best to me, btw) I was quickly brought into the glorious interface that I love. Plasma 6.6 is simply immaculate and I love it so much. Its smooth right out of the box, just some small issues annoyed me. Those were fixed with system updates.
Choosing the correct NVIDIA driver and installing it was also easy. YAsT, is still a graphical interface that controls all aspects of openSUSE, it took no longer than several minutes to navigate it after reading instructions. It did take me longer to get my system up and running as this was my first time installing openSUSE in a long time. Honestly, the amount of reboots was mildly unhinged, however necessary because updates need to be applied this way (however, openSUSE was very patient and waited for me to initiate the reboot).
I didn’t have an automated script that would reproduce my build (a handy feature that I’ve not used in years). I think once openSUSE is installed on my laptop…The next part of my learning journey will begin. I will get into coding and gradually build up my skillset into something that can be used to pour back into the Linux community.
That was true years ago…With Tumbleweed they changed that! It was so easy to install proper Nvidia drivers, I used YAsT to get it done and it honestly took just a few minutes. Fedora is a far worse experience if you want to install Nvidia drivers.
OK. When I left SuSE, they had a hate for those drivers, and every kernel update left me to reinstall them.
Naturally, that was the time I had left them too, as I am not skilled with messing with hardware installation in computers. Thankfully, the openSUSE team has regained their sanity and don’t treat NVIDIA’s hardware like a malicious force in the world (the company is pretty naff for reasons, of course). Whenever there are kernel updates now or driver updates, it will automatically go into MOK after reboot and you can sign the driver through there. It’s fairly straight forward.