I Half Switched to OpenSUSE
Bob Rubbens


No, I’m not dualbooting it!

Instead, I’m opting for a split approach: I’m running Linux Mint on my
work laptop, and OpenSUSE Slowroll on my personal laptop at home. This
way I can keep exploring a new geographically local OS, while still
having a predictable experience (= not too much change at a time) at
work.

In time, as I grow more accustomed to OpenSUSE, I can consider switching
fully. We’ll see.

The primary reason why this is such a paradigm shift for me is that, for
almost 10 years now, my strategy has been to run the same OS on all my
machines. The idea was to make sharing package lists, scripts, etc. as
easy as possible. However, in practice, I don’t make use of this
homegeneity at all. The only script sharing I do relies on the home
directories being similar, meaning my username being the same on all
machines, and some standard directories being where they should be. As
the first is entirely under my control on almost every OS, and the
second is largely guaranteed by sane operating systems following the XDG
Base Directory Specification, there’s not much use sticking to the
one-OS policy.

To compensate for me bashing OpenSUSE in my last post, let’s go through
the shortcomings I ran into of Linux Mint.

On work laptop (Lenovo P1 Gen 3)

After locking, the display would remain black with cursor visible. This
is with the 580 driver, as recommended by NVIDIA for my GPU. After
trying out all the other NVIDIA drivers, the 535 one seems to work.

The neovim package on Linux Mint is on version 0.9.5, whereas AstroNvim
requires at least 0.10. I guess I’m stuck running the AppImage binary
locally for now, which is not really a problem.

On personal laptop (Lenovo P50)

Before I switched to OpenSUSE Slowroll on my personal laptop, I briefly
had Linux Mint running on it. There were two problems.

When shutting the laptop down, it would somehow remain on! Not in a
useful way; some of the LED indicators would remain on (and functional),
and the fan would keep blowing. This is quite annoying: it’s extremely
hard to notice if you forget it, and if you don’t catch this, you risk
depleting the battery completely. Do this a bunch of times, and the
battery becomes useless, which has happened to me in the past.

Another problem was that the Linux Mint installer doesn’t really hold
your hand while using LVM to merge two disks like the OpenSUSE installer
does. I’m sure you can install Linux Mint on an LVM managed disk if you
really want to, but you have to do it manually in the command prompt
before you launch the Linux Mint installer. As I have no experience with
that and didn’t have the time to read up on it, I just installed Linux
Mint while leaving one disk untouched. That felt a bit like a waste.

Also, small annoyance: the Linux Mint installer (Casper?) window cannot
be resized! Not a huge problem, but especially annoying when
partitioning, as it was difficult to get a good overview for what the
state of the machine is like. Sure, I probably shouldn’t need Casper to
tell me what’s going with my laptop, but to be fair, for someone who
only considers this kind of stuff once every four years or so, it can be
difficult to remember which partition my gaming OS is on again.

OpenSUSE Slowroll on personal laptop so far

In terms of annoyances, I haven’t encountered anything yet! Though I’ve
only used it for an hour or so, so I might still run into problems.

I went for KDE Plasma instead of XFCE. I figured, if I’m experimenting
anyway, I should probably choose the DE that OpenSUSE spends the most
effort on, to make sure my experience will be as smooth as possible. So
far, it seems snappier than KDE on Tumbleweed; I hope it stays that way.

Somehow Slowroll seems higher quality than OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which I
found counterintuitive at first, but can also make sense if you think
about it. Because OpenSUSE Tumbleweed promises to be bleeding edge, it
sometimes has to forgo quality. Then, when things are fixed and
improved, Slowroll comes rolling along and picks up the changes. Or at
least, that’s what it feels like at the moment for me: it would be nice
if this description is always accurate. 😄 The cavemen intuition of
“bigger version = bigger experience” does not hold up if you don’t take
the time to properly integrate stuff, which is what bit me.

Since the OpenSUSE installer is better equipped to handle LVM, my
personal laptop is now using both SSDs fully. And the
shutdown-but-not-really stuff is also fixed on Slowroll. Yay!