I switched from Linux Mint which was the only distro I have ever used to OpenSuse Tumbleweed two weeks ago with the vanilla Gnome DE that it ships with and I just wanted to say; What an amazingly complete, modern, and productive combination.

Linux Mint was fine, obviously great for a beginner because it works perfectly out of the box and since it is Ubuntu based you can easily find help for practically anything. But it left a lot to be desired. I wanted more up to date packages, and a cleaner, less windows-y UI. I was never a huge fan of Cinammon as it just looked like Windows 7 and XFCE was practically windows XP in 2023, which I don’t mind given how solid and stable it was but over time it left a lot to be desired.

Here we are with Tumbleweed with Gnome.

First let’s talk about Tumbleweed. Easily the greatest rolling release distro (because of its surprising stability) if you don’t really have any niche packages you want to use that would otherwise be on the AUR. But even then, OpenSuse has community built RPM packages on their website which you can use to install packages that aren’t in Zypper. Also, I am dual booting but I practically never use my Windows partition besides for Matlab (will get to it in a bit) and wanted an encrypted setup like I had with Linux Mint. The OpenSuse Installer made it super straight forward and allowed me to create an encrypted OpenSuse partition alongside the encrypted Windows one without ever having to open up a terminal or look up commands. Another amazing thing is that the default file system is based on BTRFS which supports snapshots, which I actually did use to save myself once while I was configuring and still familiarizing myself with the distro. YaST is also another amazing OpenSuse feature that has made my life easier whether it is to look for specific software to install/delete or to change some system level settings.

Now on to Gnome. I absolutely love Gnome. I have never had experience with KDE so I can’t speak on that, but, Vanilla Gnome is probably the best desktop interface I have ever used in my whole life (a life of Windows). It is very keyboard centric and has great support for touch pads on laptops which I use a lot more than a separate mouse. I also really like how Gnome has a complete ecosystem of simple but nice looking applications. Really makes the Desktop experience feel complete. The most notable Gnome application though was Boxes. I did a little bit of research and found out that it was a VirtualBox alternative that uses QEMU as its base. I had previously heard of QEMU but never bothered trying it but this time I decided to give it a shot. While it was a bit more tricky to setup than VirtualBox, it was absolutely worth it. Earlier I mentioned that I have my Windows partition for Matlab. That is because I could not get Matlab to run underneath VirtualBox. While I know Matlab is available for Linux, I am generally not a fan of installing proprietary licensed software on my Linux desktop (unless it is a Flatpak) due to privacy reasons, and while Octave does exist, it unfortunately lacks a ton of features and commands that just do not exist yet in Octave. However, underneath QEMU, I was able to install Matlab with absolutely zero issues, works just like it would on bare metal.

Overall I am very happy with OpenSuse TW + Gnome and I am confident enough to say it is the most complete and my most favorite desktop experience I have ever had.

TLDR: I love OpenSuse Tumbleweed with Gnome