Linux Mint was the distro I chose little less than a year ago when I switched to Linux. Used it with Cinammon at first and then switched to XFCE. It’s been a cool journey and I have def learned a lot.
But over time Mint has left more to be desired, most specifically, more up to date packages. Hence why I’m leaving the Debian / Ubuntu based distros to try OpenSuSE TW with Gnome.
Any advice would be appreciated
The Tumbleweed installer is great, the general feel of the distro is polished, modern, up-to-date and efficient.
As other people have said, use the terminal to update both flatpaks and packages.
One main reason I went back to Arch BTW is that there aren’t, contrary to the old self a declaration by Suse, that many software available for my use case, so I ended up with tons of ppa’s, sorry, Suse Vendors who relied on each others for libraries, and it eventually broke down my system when some stuff wasn’t available but was required, while some may be available from 4 different, private, repos.
So I found software management a nightmare: where to find, which one to choose from? Looking for stuff in yast, then in gnome-software, then in software.opensuse.org, then on the Build Service… Clicking bliindly to trust keys from people with personal repos titled “Use At Your Own Risk”. Updating that mess then was complicated, and slow because gnome-software would lock yast while checking stuff in the background. I had to kill it, even just to relaunch it to search for stuff.
But Tumbleweed installs Snapper on Btrfs by default, so rolling back shouldn’t be a problem? True, and I did it and it’s just delicious, fuck up your system, wind back in two clicks… That is, unless btrfs snapshots didn’t got unruly, and in it’s default settings ate up all my disk space, forcing me to destroy that great system.
What annoyed me most here wasn’t the software all-over-the-place mess, but that the default, factory setting of a great system they themselves contributed to the Linux world wouldn’t be working 6 months down the line on a small disk (30Gb). Thanks to the Arch Wiki I know better now, and it is easily manageable, but it was too late for me.
Went back to Arch, with snapper, snap-pac, grub-btrfs, snapper-rollback. Can’t yet wind back like in Suse at all, currently at VM number 9, trying again, wish me luck.
TL;DR: a rolling release from a reputable company with one-click rollback is a perfect solution if you keep your system relatively standard.
That would be my only complaint about OpenSUSE, the default size for partitions is too conservative. it would default to 30gig and even though there is a snapper cleanup, acheduler updates would fill it up. I now add to the recommended x2, and then the partition always hovers around 70%. The scheduled btrfs and snapper cleanup it keep it managed
This is the reason I abandoned both Fedora and openSUSE when I tried them. I like plenty about both of them but things are just simpler on Arch. Despite Arch having less software than most distributions, it tends to be the software I actually want or need to use. The few programs not present can be installed from the AUR. Writing new PKGBUILDs is simple and there is no bureaucracy.
Arch is a pain upfront but I’ve found it tends to save you time later on. It’s not without its downsides, though; the primary one being that I’m the one responsible for managing everything and there are plenty of things I don’t know.