Most of you forum regulars know that I tend to use my laptop as a test or “distro hop” machine. I prefer to check out distros on bare metal rather than a VM. Once I got my ThinkPad T14 Gen 1 laptop a few months ago, I wanted to use it as a true secondary machine rather than a test machine.
I’ve used Arch, or Arch-based distros for many years. The last three of which have been EndeavourOS, which is installed on my main rig. And that will always be my main, day-to-day workhorse.
However, on the ThinkPad I’ve been hopping around for something different, but still Arch-based. And therein lies the problem. I’ve tested a bunch (CachyOS, Garuda, Prism, Artix, Reborn, etc). While I believe my favorite is CachyOS, none match the greatness that is EndeavourOS (though Cachy does come close). But I didn’t just want to copy the same Arch/EndeavourOS experience on the laptop. I realized that I wanted something different, outside the Arch world, but still a rolling release.
So, I’m finally settling in with openSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s been years since I last used openSUSE, and back then it was the static release. With Tumbleweed, I’m getting the rolling release experience outside the Arch world. And I’m really enjoying it as I reacquaint myself with Zypper/YaST/RPM.
So look forward to my Tumbleweed desktop appearing in Share Your Desktop soon.
Glad you like it so much, have used it at least 3 times now with one install lasting almost 2 years.
openSUSE Tumbleweed works great till it dosen’t. The Canadian mirrors totaly suck but if you set the mirror to overseas it improves a lot. Goodluck with your run.
Some time ago I tried Tumbleweed that ran fine for a while until a update caused a problem and it couldn’t find my monitor anymore. Tried a fresh install , still no go. To be clear it was only tumbleweed that had a problem with my monitor.
I think for me, that’s the point. I already know from experience that “EOS works without questions and is already familiar.” EndeavourOS is going nowhere. It will always remain on my maing custom built PC. Aside from liking to tinker around, I just want something different as a secondary computing experience.
Exactly my intention. It’s only been a few days, just familiarizing with it again. I haven’t even really messed with themes yet. But over the past few days… so far, so good. Time will tell.
I also experimented with a lot of things. But eventually I got tired of constantly returning to the fact that EOS provides everything I need. As they say - the perfect is the enemy of the good
Did you give up on Artix?, or install Tumbleweed beside it? I saw some posts from you over there … I’m giving Artix OpenRC a whirl. I wanted dinit, but had trouble with userspawn so moved to OpenRC. Turns out all I had to do was edit one config file … … I might try it again.
Maybe 6 months ago, I installed Tumbleweed. It ran ok for the very short time I had it. I enjoy messing around with package managers, but Zypper was, mmmm … weird? I don’t recall enjoying it, and left a bad taste that I never went back to. Aren’t they releasing a new desktop of sorts … Avelion, or something? Supposed to be able to “Get *** done”!!!
Couple days ago I installed Fedora 44 with MATE. Quite enjoying DNF/DNF5 and their repos seem to have everything I’ve searched for. Taking that away, to be honest, it’s just another systemd like any other. Their niche is workstation/production, so maybe I’m not using it as intended, so it ‘seems’ like any other.
EOS is still my fav … it’s the only distro I have 2 flavors loaded (XFCE and LXQt). LXQt 2.4 I adore, but they both are rock solid and I can “Get *** Done”.
