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.
Did you add Auto Yast so you can backup your system config for replicating the build?
Sadly, I have not…This is something that I will have to do in the coming weeks. As I need to get familiar with openSUSE again before digging into Auto YAsT. It might be delayed until I feel comfortable with the first programming language that I am currently learning, Python.
Yeah for sure. Its not scripting like ansible. Just open it and tell it to write out the file. You can use it the next time during install. Although with snapper rollback and btrfs it’s highly unlikely a reinstall is needed, unless you have a drive fail.
If your problem with Aurora or Bazzite is their use of reddit, discord, github. Why not try the upstream Fedora distros these are based off? I’m a Kinoite user and pretty happy with it
Eh, I thought about it…But I remembered the AI-assisted human contributions policy passed and felt uninterested in sticking with Fedora. The person who makes the contribution does have to certify all the code is accurate and won’t break anything. However, that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. My issue was mainly using GitHub for anything that isn’t directly coding related (also the fact that Microsoft is making it sloppy AF). The fact they chose Reddit and Discord on top of that for user help questions is a weird choice. Discourse literally serves that purpose the best.
Annoyingly, openSUSE has been targeted for AI Sovereignty by the EU, it’s cursed but I feel that they won’t be allowing AI-assisted contributions anytime soon. Also, they’ll do their best to keep “AI” out of end user installs, unless they want (in that case, YAsT is a click away).
a lot of what these distros do is packaging and scripting of upstream, I’d be more worried about the status of the upstream projects that flow into these distros allowing AI code than the distros themselves tbh.
The use of discord is pretty lame, I have a Bazzite machine in my backroom that I use from time to time to play indie games on and I’ve never need to get involved with their communities. Fedora uses matrix and discourse officially, I lurk on those tho
Yeah, that’s one of the reasons why I dipped from Aurora and Bazzite as they do get some stuff from Fedora, repackaging things useful for the Universal Blue base they share in common. Worse, Starship (something that Aurora packages) does contain some Claude hooks…Starship can be turned off, but it’s easier moving to a distro that I don’t have a lot of concerns about. As I don’t know how to properly parse code yet, this is better for me in the short term. Once I learn how to read programming languages and making modifications using my improved understanding, I’d feel far more comfortable with anything Fedora related. Still might stick with openSUSE or even try something a bit ballsier, like NixOS. As it’s a distro that gives you a base and you can build on this with config edits. There are other tools, but, I won’t bore you!
I like being able to get involved in communities, in case I need some complicated help, or to make suggestions in a place that doesn’t give me the ick. Linux’s community in most places is quite lovely, I’d hate to miss out on it! I rarely needed the Bazzite community because the way it was built allowed for reasonably easy modification. The documentation was good enough that I could understand it and make changes based on that knowledge…I’ll definitely miss Bazzite.
I left SuSE after many years because it was basically useless with an nvidia card.
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.
