[kwlug-disc] From Slackware to which distro?

[Doug Moen]

> Probably easier to try Fedora/KDE first.  If that doesn't work out, then 
> OpenSUSE/KDE.

Not easier. The Fedora package system is screwed up after installing Mate, so I expect a KDE install to fail. Since I want to wipe the disk and reinstall the OS from scratch anyway, I'm going direct to OpenSUSE.

> By default, now, Fedora-36 makes a btrfs partition, subvolume "root" and 
> "home", and mounts those as / and /home.  So, you can do snapshot 
> manually, if Fedora doesn't do it for you.

True, but I don't want to build my own system snapshot tools or port an existing tool. I want this feature to already be built in and supported. I want an OS that supports the core system features that a Mac or Windows user expects to be present, and that works out of the box.

Mint provides 'timeshift', which periodically creates system snapshots on a timed schedule. Mint *supports* timeshift: it works. Fedora provides the timeshift package but it doesn't work, so currently (Fedora 34) you have to get timeshift from github.

OpenSUSE provides 'snapper', which is developed by OpenSUSE and tightly integrated into the system. Snapshots are created automatically when you install packages using the package manager. Grub is also integrated: you can specify which snapshot to boot from. Although Fedora provides snapper as a package, they don't try to make it work, and the 3rd party instructions for making it work are quite complex.

Two killer features of SUSE are Snapper and Yast. Yast is an integrated system administration tool with both a CLI and a GUI: it edits your system configuration and installs/removes packages, as necessary. This seems like a pretty advanced idea (compared to the fragmented configuration and package management UIs in other distros).

OpenSUSE takes FOSS ethics seriously (sort of the opposite of Ubuntu). As a result, there is no closed source or patent restricted software in the OpenSUSE repositories. (OpenZFS is hosted by OpenSUSE in the "filesystem" repo, but that repo is not in the default install.)

To get patent restricted codecs into your web browser, there is an independent third party non-profit called Packman that hosts nonfree packages in a SUSE compatible repo. There is a third party "spin" of OpenSUSE called Gecko Linux that includes these repos and packages in the default install. Gecko also fixes some other "paper cut" problems with OpenSUSE, from the perspective of a mainstream desktop distro.

It is not recommended to use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with an nVidia graphics card, since OpenSUSE does not test nVidia's binary blob in their automated integration testing. No problem for me since I switched to AMD.

I will be installing Gecko/KDE (once I have time).