OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 Review, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Review of the Week and More

For many years, SUSE - and openSUSE - has been my daily driver, my favorite Linux distro. It had everything one could expect - speed, stability, professional edge, top-end tooling. And then, one day, it simply stopped being awesome. I've been trying to rekindle that first Tux love ever since. Without luck.

You can read all about my past openSUSE endeavors by reading my last review and working your way into the past, up the hill of enthusiasm and happiness. In fact, my overall Linux desktop experience has been going down for quite some time, and recently, I've decided to do my reviews short and sweet. Well, not having touched openSUSE for quite some time, I wanted to check Leap 15.2 again, to see what gives. Can I haz the old fun back?

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This was longer than I anticipated - or warranted. Call it my nostalgic infatuation with openSUSE. It pains me to say, but openSUSE Leap 15.2 isn't any friendlier or smarter than many of its previous versions. In fact, it's pretty nerdy and largely inaccessible to ordinary folks, despite some rather brilliant elements in its design. But you cannot reconcile those with a fundamentally broken package management, missing day-to-day software and fun bits, and tons of visual and ergonomic inconsistencies.

The installer is no longer as safe and intelligent as it used to be. Everything is a bit less. Such a shame. Because YaST is cool, and SUSE utilities are generally top-notch and pro. But then, there's a clash between what should be a desktop for ordinary people and an enterprise sysadmin frontend, in a way. Kind of between what you get with default CentOS and CentOS plus all my gravy and changes. Well, sad but hardly surprising. Maybe one day. That said, much like my Fedora 33 review, I will have a separate post-install tweaks guide, for those who do want to use openSUSE Leap as their desktop machine. Given my experience, I can't recommend it, and it joins a long list of painful memories in my Tux journey.

Xmas is upon us – at least in some areas of the world. This means quitea lot of people are away from their computers and the number of submissions is getting a bit lower. Tumbleweed is not stopping though – it just rolls at the pace contributors create submissions. For week 2020/52 this means a total of 3 snapshots that were published. Saddest of this all is that the new kernel 5.10 is not behaving very nicely when the iwlwifi module is being loaded.

There have been a lot of great developments in the open source world, it seems like software packages rolling down on openSUSE Tumbleweed have just been rock-solid. KDE Plasma 5.20 has been an incredible joy to have on all my machines. If you have a touch screen, the interface controls are top-notch. I learned of a replacement shell called FISH which may very well be the neatest terminal based tool I have ever used. I am truly thankful for all the hard work put in by so many people to make life on the computer more enjoyable and productive.

I have been able to continue to enjoy my time with the Destination Linux Network where I can make a positive contribution to the community on a regular basis. I have been able to meet some incredible people with such incredible knowledge and seemingly endless patience. I have been able to learn so many new and interesting things because of the interactions and I am forever grateful.