Many many years ago (20 ish) I was playing with all sorts of Linux distributions (peanut, slackware, mandrake, redhat, gentoo, suse and more) and back then I came up with my top 3 preferred Linux distros. My original top 3 looked like this: 1) Slackware; 2) RedHat; 3) Debian; because at that time in terms of ease of use, in terms of community, in terms of security not to mention work it made sense (we’re talking 2000’s) . Later on (2010’s) this top 3 changed like so: 1) Gentoo; 2) Slackware; 3) RedHat; because Gentoo gave me more flexibility when it came to custom compiling most recent versions of various software not to mention security. Now (2020’s) my top 3 changed again and here’s how it looks like: 1) Gentoo; 2) openSUSE; 3) Ubuntu; ( 4) RedHat; )
How did this happen? … you’re asking yourselves (or not but I’ll explain anyway because this is my blog after all …)
Simple. Once in a while (2 – 3 years) I check what’s out there … in the Unix/Linux community … and create a list with the distros that seem to be most popular and try to understand why, I also look at the old distros that are still alive and compare with the more popular ones, then I look at exotic stuff as well (stuff that might have been created with a particular job in mind such as XCP-NG) and after I’m done looking I start testing.
Every time I do this I’m surprised of what I find … for example last year I tested CentOS8 (Stream and classic) and I was surprised by the lack of creativity from the RedHat ppl, later on I was playing with Ubuntu 20 and I noticed that this community has been busy … and it shows, after that I looked at ReactOS (which is an awesome project but not stable enough in my book) and a few more distros (OpenVZ, XCP-NG, Slackware, etc) until I got to openSUSE which knocked my socks off.
Installing the OS revealed an advanced but so easy to use Yast which allowed me to setup complex networking (bonding, vlans on top, bridges on top, ip addresses on top of that – which no other distro that I tested allowed me to do that at install time via their “simple” install wizard) not to mention some complex storage (we’re talking boot partition encryption, btrfs, options to choose from gpt /msdos, finesse settings for various software raid levels , finesse settings for btrfs snapshoting and subvolumes – which again I have yet to see on other distros that are out there). With the install phase gone I was now looking at working with the distro itself so I started setting stuff up … web servers, database servers, replication, DRBD and even openstack because why not … and … I must admit … these guys did an awesome job.
The distro is using new enough versions of packages (I tested Leap 15.1 and later on I upgraded it to 15.2) and feels extremely stable not to mention it is using the standard systemd crap which should facilitate an easy transition for ppl used with CentOS or Ubuntu or any other distro that uses it … as a matter of fact … because it felt so good I decided to use it on a few nodes part of my labs (as hypervisors doing KVM on replicated storage – DRBD) and on a personal notebook (my daughter’s) on which other stock distro images no longer worked because they ditched some of the drivers.
Oh, I forgot to mention one tiny aspect, these guys are awesome for one more thing and that is … they maintain arm images (you know for Raspberry Pi) which I also tested and was not disappointed.
Short version: I’m impressed! and so should you be if you give it a try. PS. I think going forward you can expect that I’ll be posting some more tests / setups which have it as the centrepiece.
Enjoy!