Well I gave openSUSE a shot.
Honestly it was more coincidental than anything. I needed to install a linux and all I had was a tiny pathetic USB flash disk from the last millennium.
Obviously the main install CD was far too large to even attempt, so I ended up going with the netinstall. Didn’t boot with a load of udev errors, couldn’t fix it with any of the suggested boot flags, gave up pretty quick.
I went around the usual other distributions looking for a small install I could use. The ubuntu alternate CD seems to have exponentially grown and hidden itself on some wiki page, also there was no iso for the most beta of the upcoming release and I’d have rather gone with that. Fedora seem to have dismissed the idea anyone would have any issues with a multi gig install medium and I couldn’t find any solution there.
Anyway I ended up back at openSUSE netinstall, however tumbleweed this time. For whatever reason tumbleweed worked basically fine (except when I messed it up later the installer would get stuck at 75% when scanning the drives when openSUSE was already installed, which could only be fixed by formatting the install from outside the installer)
The openSUSE installer is absolutely fucking beautiful. It honestly blew me away. I found it as easy and functional (or more so) than the ubuntu installer, however unlike the latter it somehow managed to give me loads of great options, just slightly off the beaten track - in an obviously placed advanced menu or a dropdown - without being remotely intimidating to a new user. The suggested format wasn’t what I wanted so it came up with another list of alternatives, of which one was correct. I had a look at the manual formatting as well and it all seemed great.
Also for Langridge, I set my country to UK and it set the keyboard to UK without any issue. I was tempted to install enlightenment to see if you were wrong about that too but I went with gnome in the end.
I’m sort of interested as to why openSUSE goes for btrfs for root by default and XFS for home. I honestly forgot XFS even existed and searching for it generally comes up with complaints and slander rather than any compliments. As for btrfs, every time I had to plugpull my computer, from later issues, I ended up having to do a btrfs check --repair from an external linux to get it to boot again. That said snapshots are a really cool feature and I cannot wait to be able to use them without these other disadvantages.
The default openSUSE gnome desktop was really nice. I have always really hated gnome3 but considering the reaction of some of the bad voltage presenters to being pleasantly suprised by gnome3 - I decided to try it.
I’ve always seen where gnome3 has been headed but when I first tried it - it was just so far away from completing the experience it set out for. With openSUSE and gnome 3.16, it was a lot damn closer than I remember. I was perfectly content with gnome for several days. I found YaST helped cover a lot of the bases gnome3 really fails at.
Eventually though I had to give up on gnome, due to the same complaint I have always had with gnome3 - give me some god damn options. Gnome’s attitude on this is absolutely fucking annoying as hell. I understand that they want to make a nice easy desktop for even complete newbies, commendations there. However they completely exacerbate the usability issues in Linux by removing all the “complicated” gui options. Well fucking great so to do anything, even from changing a key layout to getting rid of mouse acceleration I need to use a command line, congratulations, complete design failure imo. Even the GUI options on windows are far more extensive, even the Mac OS. If they amended this stupid attitude to options I think I could like gnome a lot but this terrible design decision frustrates me to hell.
Worth mentioning as its own topic, I felt YaST got a well undeserved pummelling in the review, its absolutely great - the highlight of the experience id say. Having good extensive options in a simple centralised location is a great boon to the complete lack of any options in gnome. Later when I was having X issues the revelation that you could load a completely featured YaST ncurses UI without a GUI was amazingly helpful. Even the random list of variables wasn’t something I disliked, I just used the search function with common sense terms and always got what I was looking for immediately. No lag issues, though I do have a gaming rig so even if it was super slow I probably wouldn’t experience it. YaST is an absolutely stellar feature beyond anything iv seen on any other linux distro or other OS.
Eventually I was forced to move away because of the nvidia drivers. It was clearly stated on the wiki that you would have to do a manual installation to get them to work on tumbleweed, and reinstall them every kernel update. Regardless of this being a stupid problem it wasn’t something I had an issue with. However the drivers just flat out refused to work for me no matter what I did.
After trying everything I said a fairly sad farewell to my opensuse desktop and threw arch over it, in which the nvidia drivers worked without issue.
Anyway to conclude, a lot of problems, plenty probably due to being forced to use tumbleweed though. Gnome 3 is a lot better than I remember but still unusable. YaST is fucking great. The installer is fucking great. Doubt I will use again but if someone could guarentee the bugs I experienced would not happen again I would probably recommend it to a new Linux convert.