Why I've switched to openSUSE

Not long after my last blog post, I was helping the PCLinuxOS devs with the transition to KDE 6. Tex (the PCLOS BDFL) had recently created a KDE6 repo and I decided, foolishly, to give the KDE 6 repo a try. My task has primarily been to get the latest version of SDDM to work on PCLinuxOS so that the transition to Wayland would (hopefully) be easier. I made a BTRFS snapshot before giving the KDE 6 repo a try, and it was my luck that I was left with a broken version of the Plasma session that would not launch, and programs like Konsole were still using their version from 5 which led to a ring of dependency troubles. By the way, I managed to get the latest version of SDDM (0.21) to work, but it still had the same issues running Wayland as the previous one.

Time to revert back, right? I had made a BTRFS snapshot before, so it was time to just pull up that snapshot using Timeshift. I used Timeshift's restoration tool which failed to mount the snapshot, so I just tried to mount the subvolume myself. It resulted in a panic.. Great. So for some odd reason I don't understand, each BTRFS snapshot taken by Timeshift (even on PCLOS) had files from when I was using Devuan before. I decided to give BTRFS a try on Devuan after using EXT4 for my entire time running Linux to see what the hype was about. I'm starting to think maybe it was a fault of Timeshift, maybe I should've used a different tool or make my own cronjobs manually to create BTRFS snapshots, so I'm not going to blame BTRFS.

I'm also not going to blame PCLinuxOS, PCLinuxOS in its hayday had many packagers, but today, it seems only Tex himself does the packaging. I've tried to help but I am not the best at it myself, and my biggest gripe has to be that most packages are built without any man pages or other documentation to help us when things go wrong. If you remembered, in my last post I had a list of things I want out of a distribution:

~~Can be installed offline (i.e it's not just a net installer)~~

No systemd (or pretending you don't use systemd because you have elogind)

~~Useful as a desktop and server~~

PCLinuxOS only fits one of the criteria. I tried to give it more credit in that you can indeed install it offline and you may even be able to turn it into a server but both of these are in the most basic way possible. PCLinuxOS will install all of the software that's on a live CD which for most of the ISOs means proprietary garbage like Anydesk or Spotify. Seriously, I would not put a proprietary remote connection tool that's used to scam old people for a distro meant for boomers. If you're wanting to use PCLinuxOS, I can only recommend the KDE Darkstar edition for security reasons. Additionally, the Live CD only works on Virtualbox, so if you prever KVM/QEMU then you're out of luck if you want to test it in a virtual environment before installing.

openSUSE has parallels to PCLinuxOS. openSUSE is the continuation of SUSE Linux which was quite popular in the 90's and early 2000's, much like Mandrake to PCLinuxOS. If we look at my chart of things I want out of a distribution, openSUSE meets two:

Can be installed offline (i.e it's not just a net installer)

~~No systemd (or pretending you don't use systemd because you have elogind)~~

Useful as a desktop and server

So it's like a direct inverse of PCLinuxOS. I'm more willing to use systemd in full rather than "systemd-free" distros which take the worst parts of systemd like logind. My philosophy is you should use the majority of systemd or don't use it at all, because systemd is designed to have all of it together. For the record, I don't dislike systemd because it's somehow taking your data or I hate Lennart Poettering, I just think its defaults are pretty bad and the hierarchy is too. Configuration is all over the place. But one thing that systemd does have is extensive documentation, so I could learn the configuration of different components. openSUSE has the best implementation of systemd I've used as well, there was no need to tweak the job times to avoid the "A stop job is running" crap.

Systemd is a minor issue for openSUSE when it's probably the only distro besides Slackware with extensive tools for maintaining the system. It's better to treat openSUSE as an OS unto itself. YaST is a fantastic installer that reminds me of the ones I would want in my own distro and then YaST can be used after installation for managing packages and configuring systemd. In the installer, you can pick from a wide array of packages so the system you're deploying is ready as soon as you've finished installing. openSUSE has a rolling and a stable release version so it's a "one size fits all" approach that is appealing to me. I personally went with the rolling release edition called Tumbleweed. openSUSE also makes creating and hosting your own RPM packages quite easy with its Open Build Service, so I can continue my passion for packaging.

And no, this does not mean I shill for systemd now or am against PCLinuxOS. I will always advocate for distributions that don't use the massive pile of crap known as systemd or its components like logind. I just made a mistake and used what I had lying around because I found openSUSE Leap to be pretty good for a server and then Tumbleweed makes a fine desktop. I just wish they at least supported one alternative init such as OpenRC. One day I'd like to come back to PCLinuxOS.

My packages for PCLOS will not disappear anytime soon, and I will leave them in a "Legacy" section of the Linux page. You can find my OBS repository there as well.