After a couple years on Fedora I decided to do one more Distro hop- to one I have little experience with, openSUSE.
But it seems the everything from the installer, philosophy, package manager, configs, and general way of working is just very different than every Distro I’ve tried before (Debian/*Buntu, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo)
Like what’s up with YaST? It’s like a system-wide settings/configs program plus a package manager front end unique to openSUSE?
And to update grub it seems the best command is “update-bootloader” - for example. This isn’t standard on anything else afaik. Is there anywhere other than practice I can learn all of these quirks?
I use Slackware because, in my opinion, it is simple, easy to understand, doesn’t get in your way, and strikes a good balance between being up to date, stable, and bug free. I also have it set up how I like it and don’t feel like installing something else. Honestly, the lack of dependency resolution has really not been a problem. By default, Slackware comes with a lot of libraries, and sbopkg (which builds SlackBuilds from slackbuilds.org) can do dependency resolution, as can some third party package managers. And with appimages and flatpacks, this is less and less of a problem.
That said, I use Manjaro on my Pinebook and am perfectly happy with it, and I’ve used Debian in the past too.
<rant> I use RHEL at work and it’s not bad, but I don’t really care for it. It feels overly complicated in terms of configuration and daemons running, and I don’t know systemd that well. Although I think this is mostly the fault of our satellite server, “dnf update” breaks on me at least once a month. Also, some packages are just plain archaic, and didn’t even update from RHEL 7 to 8. And I can’t seem to wrap my head around source rpms or how to make rpms. Slackware and Manjaro use straightforward build scripts. </rant>
Off topic, but how do you like the pine book? I have been on the fence for a while now!
Overall, pretty good considering it’s low price. It is a bit quirky, kind of like running Linux on a laptop 15+ years ago. Hardware support is somewhat lacking because it’s all pretty new. That said, the default Manjaro that ships with it works pretty well out of the box. It struggles a bit with video conferencing, in my case, roll20. It can play Minetest and Supertuxkart on minimum settings.