Friendship Ended With openSUSE

I detailed as much a few days ago, and it’s part of why I haven’t written quite as much as I was hoping I would this past few days, but I spent a massive amount of time troubleshooting my PC where I accidentally my Arch installation (not a typo).

Reinstalling Arch was no big deal, really. Getting things set up, as time-consuming as it could always be, wasn’t a big deal either! I’m honestly still enjoying how I’m getting a much lighter and simpler Arch install out of the whole thing.

But openSUSE was a tremendous pain throughout the whole process of trying to salvage my system.

I really wanted and still want to like the distro. Before my reinstall of it late last year, I had last used openSUSE in 2009 on a Toshiba laptop. However, I was unable to get used to it and went back to the familiar embrace of Ubuntu at the time. But considering how far Linux has come during the 2010s, I thought my attempt to use the distro would have been better this time. It usually had a sort of mystique around it that made me want to give it a closer look, so I decided when I upgraded my NVME drive that, instead of using the smaller one as a secondary storage that I could run openSUSE Tumbleweed on it with the full power of my hardware.

My stint this time around was the longest I ever ran the distro, but it kept proving to be a pain for me to use as an actual daily driver compared to Fedora or any other RPM-based distro that I could compare it to. Anything I could do easily on Fedora would, on occasion, be harder or wonkier on openSUSE.

However, I spent a massive amount of time troubleshooting the computer during and after my mishap with Arch. I used to triple boot Arch, openSUSE, and Windows 11. (While I don’t use Windows as a daily driver at all, I still keep it for occasional games or programs that I can’t really run in Wine or Bottles.)

My reinstall of Arch was easy thanks to the archinstall script. I was extremely impressed with it as a whole and found myself up and running again much faster than my 2020 attempt to reinstall by following the Archwiki. However, my reinstall somehow broke Windows 11’s bootloader, which unraveled a massive problem after another that proved to be a gargantuan headache overall. It was like playing a slow, soul-sucking game of Whack-A-Mole.

I wanted to install Windows 11 again, but to do that without the media creation tool that Microsoft tries to get people using on existing Windows systems, I had to get the ISO and write it to a USB stick. No big deal so far.

I looked into it and it seemed that WoeUSB was the gold standard for writing a bootable Windows USB stick from Linux. From my Arch install, I got the dependencies I needed and got it ready to write.

The only problem was in the writing process. I soon saw a message saying I needed to have GRUB installed. What a fine time for me to have reinstalled Arch with systemd-boot, I thought to myself. But hey, my openSUSE Tumbleweed installation has GRUB. I could just install WoeUSB on that openSUSE system and write the Windows 11 ISO to that USB drive. It should be a piece of cake, right?

Right?

Package Management

I recalled an extremely annoying thing about running openSUSE these past few months: openSUSE has a lot of different, alternative names for dependencies where, even if you manage to get them all installed, the different names can still likely throw off the program you’re trying to use said dependencies with. It happened to me when I tried to use MullvadVPN on openSUSE and it was happening again here. However, unlike my attempts to get Mullvad working, I was running out of patience rapidly and just wanted to get everything on my computer back to working as intended. I was not going to find openSUSE’s “quirkiness” endearing at a time like this.

Of course, there’s always YAST, a tool that seems to be polarizing amongst Linux enthusiasts. Some diehards love how it has everything reachable and configurable in one place (think the Windows 7 Control Panel, but more powerful), while others have decried it as clunky and inconvenient to work with. Generally, I had no real issues with YAST as a whole, although I mostly used zypper commands to update my system. Emphasis on mostly; after an update here or there, I would have to deal with PackageKit blocking further attempts to check for updates. The only way to get rid of it was to remove packagekit and blacklist it. That’s not so bad, I thought again to myself.

Still, regarding WoeUSB and Mullvad, there were several pieces of software I would want to run that weren’t available in default openSUSE repositories and, on an Arch-based system, could easily be found in the AUR.

With openSUSE, I wasn’t entirely out of luck, however, as I could easily use the 1-click installs from the openSUSE software website. This is generally seen as one of the distro’s stronger points when compared to other RPM-based distros. In concept, why give yourself a headache trying to add repos manually in the terminal or run scripts when you could just click a link on the openSUSE website and have YAST open up to install the program? The concept is an excellent idea, and it was how I got a (slightly wonky) version of Mullvad to finally work on my system, so I could use it to get WoeUSB, right?

Right?

error occurred while initializing the software repository valid metadata not found

I got this type of error message every. Single. Time. I tried. To install. Something. That day. From the openSUSE 1-click repos. I got it so many times that I almost wish I had screenshotted it.

I tried every imaginable community-submitted spin of WoeUSB. I even tried a few other random packages I knew I wouldn’t use, but still got the error. Even running an update in the terminal gave me some sort of similar error and timed out. Looking it up and trying to troubleshoot it was no help, as I found some post on it a few years or months ago saying that the openSUSE website was down and I would just have to wait for it to come back. Unfortunately, I failed to find a suitable workaround in this situation. I was running out of patience and had already lost too much of my time.

Bugginess on KDE

I originally installed openSUSE from its KDE spin, which would have given me something different than my GTK-centric Arch system. After all, modern KDE was a big reason I fell back in love with using Linux in 2020, so being able to come back to that should have been perfect.

Not so with openSUSE. It’s a serious shame too, because KDE is seen as openSUSE’s flagship desktop environment. If anything, this should be a distro where it really shines.

And you know what? It did work perfectly… at least for a good while.

Fast forward to when I ran a sizable update. After the reboot, I couldn’t login using KDE and Wayland anymore. It would just bring me right back to the login screen. I had no issues before that, so I wasn’t sure what the problem was. After some fruitless troubleshooting, I concluded it was just me and tried using xorg to run KDE again.

That’s when several programs refused to open. I would launch Firefox, the KDE settings, Dolphin, Okular, no matter what it was, and best case scenario, it would appear for a split second and then vanish as if I hadn’t opened it. Most of the time, I would see no indicator that the computer even tried to open it.

I found another workaround in importing my Awesome WM config files from Arch and setting up things mostly the way I would have them on Arch. Yes, another workaround instead of a solution; the very idea that I was trying to toe around my problems instead of being able to fix them seemed to be a recurring thing with me during my time using openSUSE. While my Awesome setup was living up to its namesake, it was almost exactly the same experience as my Arch desktop. What would be the point of booting into openSUSE at that point if I got the same overall look and feel that I had on my Arch desktop?

Trying To Fix Everything

But going back to my booting situation, I tried a few other fixes like running os-prober from openSUSE, although I had a hell of a time trying to get my old Arch install’s GRUB menu to even pick it up (openSUSE, from what I’ve gathered, does things differently in GRUB due to its btrfs partition or something). I tried to wrangle around with it again and troubleshoot to no avail as a whole. Eventually, I just gave up and, once again finding a workaround, settled on using rEFInd.

While rEFInd isn’t much to look at out of the box, it solved my headache… for the most part. My Windows drive, however, was still not detected in rEFInd. Going through my UEFI configuation and booting manually got me no results either. While I still didn’t know what broke my Windows install (seriously, I don’t use it very often), I decided that openSUSE wasn’t going to help at this point. To avoid giving myself a potential headache and installing grub and systemd-boot on my Arch system at the same time, I wiped openSUSE entirely and installed the Fedora-based Nobara Linux, an excellent RPM distro with sane defaults for PC gamers.

But you know what? WoeUSB installed with no issues or headaches whatsoever on Nobara. Getting the dependencies was simple because they had the exact same names as they do on Fedora, and I got a USB stick with Windows 11 written out in no time at all.

Of course, Windows 11 proved to be a challenge to reinstall as well, wasting a tremendous amount of my time too. It refused to actually begin the process until I physically disconnected my Arch and Nobara drives inside of my system.

I know I’ve already complained at length about Windows in its current state, but trying to reinstall Windows 11 was a colossal, royal pain. It was so fussy, almost as if it wanted to tell me that it wouldn’t reinstall unless I had everything the way it wanted like a petulant, spoiled child. I know this part has little bearing on openSUSE, but my patience was at an all-time low at this point and I had enough.

But after reinstalling Windows 11, setting up rEFInd on my Nobara drive, and setting my motherboard to boot from my Nobara drive, everything was finally working again. I could easily boot into Arch, Nobara, and Windows 11 from rEFInd now. After such a long, time-consuming journey, everything was working again.

Goodbye For Now, openSUSE

In the off-chance anyone misread this entire post, this isn’t my attempt to mindlessly bash openSUSE or, by extension, its users. I’m not here to convince people that the distro they’re using is wrong and that they should be running something else. Rather, this is just my honest and unfortunate recollection of how my experience with the distro turned out.

I’m still a bit sad over the whole thing because, when it was working as intended, openSUSE was excellent. I had invested a lot of time ricing the system and really making it my own, and it’s all gone now.

During my many attempts at troubleshooting, I would come across others who ran it with no discernible issues whatsoever, and I’m jealous. I’m jealous they were able to have such a smooth experience while I experienced what felt like one issue after another. I remember quite little of my experience running the distro in 2009 (Tumbleweed didn’t even exist yet), but I will definitely remember my experience running it late 2022 to now. Maybe one day I’ll have the right setup and luck to get a perfect experience with openSUSE. When that day comes, maybe I’ll really use it as my daily driver.

Right?

What is your experience with openSUSE like? Have you ever used the distro at all? Do you run it as a daily driver, or do you use a different distro or OS entirely? What is your opinion on openSUSE?