Conclusion
There you go. A review, if you will. On a funny side, someone emailed me, asking me to stop doing them. C'mon, I've only been doing this for nigh twenty years. It's still early to quit. I'm too legit to quit. Gotta show commitment. So you might see a few reviews here and there, not very often, when the mood strikes, when my optimism levels fool me into a sense of complacency. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed triggers a sort of neutral feeling. Neither good, nor bad, just okay. It has lots of nice things, but the bittersweet part is, almost everything that's cool about the system, on the system level, hails back to the glory days of SUSE, when it still had that serious, professional enterprise streak. YaST, installer, reasonable defaults, this is all old school stuff.
And to answer the question people asked me, mostly in the context of my Slimbook Executive experience, why Ubuntu and its derivatives, or why not something else? Well, one, for all its woes, Ubuntu does software management ever so slightly better. Not much, but slightly better. Two, it doesn't really matter. The Linux desktop is in a sorry state. All distros have similar issues. They have bugs, crashes, aesthetic problems, overload of nerdiness, no real accessibility to common users, echo chamber syndrome, all of the usual things. And, objectively, they are less friendly than they used to be, as we had better functionality, more quality, and more hope ten years ago than we do now. This review is a good example. Oh, and Windows 11 being dog turds doesn't mean anything! The fact someone else does a shoddy job is no excuse for anyone else to do a shoddy job.
Well, there you go. I like openSUSE Tumbleweed. SUSE was my first ever distro, and so it will always have a special place in me heart. There's a lot to like, but then, the software management part is way too messy and complicated, and there are small oddities all over the place. So in a way, much like the rest. Thus, if you prefer this brand of Linux, go for it. But my overall feel is, at the end of the day, it doth not matter, or if push comes to shove, Ubuntu (or rather Kubuntu) is a tad ahead of the rest, since you get a bit more order in the software space (but not much), and there's Ubuntu Pro for ten years of peace. But if you wanna tumble, Tumbleweed it is. Some nice, clever choices, old school spirit, but it ain't enough for that wow factor. We're done.
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