openSUSE Tumbleweed is the Best Distro No One Knows About

I've been at SUSE for 4 months now. Of course the company keeps my primary focus on our Enterprise customers, but I have learned a lot more how openSUSE is built and used in the four months, and I have to say, I am impressed. I think Tumbleweed is the best developer distro that nobody knows about.

On my main laptop I opted to install the "stable" verion of openSUSE called "Leap." (you can read about that here). I followed suit on my $65 laptop, but ran into some issues based on the cheapness and newness of the laptop's components. For example, the wifi module was not recognized, and the built in speakers just didn't work. The wifi issue was obvious; the wifi module was too new for Leap 15.5, and I was too lazy to compile and install an up to date kernel driver for it.

As I learned more about openSUSE, I finally understood the difference between Tumbleweed and Leap, and I realized that Tumbleweed would probably work well on my oddball $65 laptop.

How is openSUSE built anyway?

openSUSE is unique, because it is both upstream of Suse Linux Enterprise, and downstream from it. Basically, what happens is:

1. The openSUSE community is constantly packaging upstream software with the Open Build Server.
2. Those packages are constantly being built into openSUSE Tumbleweed, which is, therefore, a rolling release. There is a quality assurance process that keeps Tumbleweed stable in the sense of "not crashy."
3. Periodically, those packages from the Open Build Server, which become highly used and vetted by the community using Tumbleweed, then get moved into SUSE's Internal Build Server. From there, SUSE builds Certified and L3 Supported packages, that go into SUSE Linux Enterprie releases. This is a paid Enterprise product.
4. Out of those packages, openSUSE Leap is built. Leap, therefore, is essentially the same as SUSE Linux Enterprise, but without the certifications and support.

I assume I got some details wronng above, but I think that's the gist of it.

Choice happens. You can choose a high quality rolling release, a fully supported Enterprise release with a long lifecycle, or a free (as in speach and beer) release with the same lifecycle and bits as the Enterprise version.

For simplicity, I left out that there are even more options. For example, do you want an immutable OS with transactional updates? The openSUSE community has you covered with Microos.

So How did it Go?

Installing Tumbleweed was actually pretty boring. The main difference from installing Leap was that the wifi driver was recogized by the kernel (as I expected). I was pleasantly surprised to see that I also a built in LTE modem.

Up to Date

Looks like after install, every single package is up to date with the repositories. I uppose the installer installed all up to date packages from the repositories, which is sweet.

WIFI woes

However, while the built in wifi seemsto work, I noticed that when I am downloading files, they sometimes get "stuck." Either the server times out, or the data trickles in so slowly the files will never download. More on this bellow.

Next Steps

So now I seem to be a happy Tumbleweed user. I have installed my work software (Slack, etc...) so I am planning to take this device as my only laptop on an upcoming work trip to Europe in May. I should be in meetings most of the time, so it's a pretty low risk situation.

Follow up on Issues

So, this wifi issue ... this seems like a good opportunity for me to help out with the community however modestly. I will learn how to log an issue in the right place, and then see if I can help who ever turns out to be the right mainter address the bug.

Connect with the Community

I am motivated to started looking at this issue as openSUSE Conference is coming up at the end of June, and I am looking forward to connecting with community members and generally learning how the openSUSE community works, and seeing how I can collaborate and help.