The answer is subject to how you use Linux. In my case, I'm running several installations. Some are for file, email and samba servers. Several of them are KVM hosts and the majority are KVM guests.

I use Linux in general because it is stable, secure and has a small footprint. I still use Ubuntu for one server. Other than that, I stopped using it back when they were pushing Mir because on VMs, Mir and LightDM were impossibly slow. That's when I started using OpenSuSE. I've stayed with OpenSuSE for several years now because for business application development it works very well. Even though I'm no longer afraid of using the Terminal, I appreciated a GUI to help get tasks done. A well written GUI will do anything that can be done in the Terminal but is visually easier to use. It's also easy to connect OpenSuSE to a Samba AD DC (or Windows for that matter). I don't find performance to be at all slow but I came from Ubuntu/Mir/LightDM. That may have changed now that Ubuntu dumped LightDM. When people complain about performance it's most likely related to the desktop software because the underlying Linux is nearly the same across all popular distros.

Some people say that OpenSuSE is buggy but they might have started shortly after a major version upgrade. Seems like all vendors have more bugs upon releasing a new major version. I find that OpenSuSE Leap 42.3 is stable and more recently Leap 15 is also stable.

Probably the biggest frustration with OpenSuSE is the lack of documentation for things that are well documented in Ubuntu. I periodically post on the OpenSuSE forums to see if the documentation for specific items can be created or improved.

Same, I would add that it always seems like the closest to a Microsoft Linux merger. And lets not forget their deal with Microsoft (ok, it was Novell but thats just semantics).

PS: Use what you like, it doesn't matter what others like or what others think is the best. If its the best for you, then use it.

As an aside, SUSE began as a German distro based on Slackware. Oh my, how it has diverged.

1 members found this post helpful.

So, rather than continue to make assumptions based on possible old info, I decided to fire up the openSUSE netinstall and get up and running with a MATE desktop, avoiding the "heavyweights" Gnome and KDE. As previously discussed, however, Plasma 5 is pretty light these days.

Aside from my usual complaints about the "major" Linux distros (systemd, etc.), I found it to be quite attractive and usable, although still what I would consider on the heavy side of RAM usage for MATE (usually between 200-300MB on a fresh boot), and only a little sluggish.

For what it's worth...

EDIT: Oops, gave it more RAM, not so sluggish now.

Attached Thumbnails

 

Plasma 5 is pretty light these days, much lighter than its counterpart Gnome. If I remember, Gnome used a 900-1gig at idle, while KDE was more like 600-700. I typically don't check mem usage because frankly I don't care. I have always been an advocate of buying a crapload of hardware just because. I understand not everyone does that so I am not being critical, but for me, I am more concerned with the functionality of a desktop, not its memory usage. I am using a gig right now on FreeBSD with cwm (window manager) and a bunch of apps open, to include chromium, which is probably using most of that gig...but I have 32GB so don't really care.

openSUSE Leap 15 with KDE was then slickest implementation of KDE I have used to date. My only gripe with it was Suse's installer, the partitioner part to be exact. Not terribly user friendly, but once I figured it out it's fine. The 15 series Leap had some partitioning improvements so that was good.

Yeah, the partitioning was the only part where I had to really stop and think about things very much. Not very intuitive.

2 members found this post helpful.

yast has a gui that you can point and click to blacklist those programs and keep them off

but YES OpenSUSE is a bit bloated but for me it has been VERY stable with no issues

I'm wondering about the use of Btrfs/XFS as the defaults for openSUSE. Does this have anything to do with the impression of bloat/slowness? I don't really know much of anything about these file systems, beyond that Btrfs allows for snapshots and such. Is it perhaps because of this functionality that the system might appear to be slower?

I don't know if this is a quirk of the ext4 file system (which is what I'm accustomed to on Linux), but one of my complaints of it is that file copying to connected disks/drives is slow. It initially seems to be fast, by quickly jumping to, say, 85%, but then the remaining 15% of the file transfer takes forever. On my Mac, files copying is very fast in comparison.

Is this different with Btrfs?

I don't think so. Btrfs is being pulled by RH but Suse remains committed. On Linux, I have been using the EXT variants with zero issues. I know they don't have cool features, but to me, reliability is better than anything. I guess you can do snapshots on btrfs, which I do using ZFS on FreeBSD and that is a very cool feature, but I don't do it on my workstation, only my build server.

I never understood the bloat/slow complaints because my experience with Leap 15 and KDE has always been positive. I do have a lot of hardware though so typically don't worry about resources.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the info.

I'm using Leap 15 with MATE right now on my ThinkPad T61 with 8GB RAM, and it's as fast as anything else running MATE, so no complaints there. Everything feels very stable, cool, and quiet. Most recently I was running OpenBSD with dwm, but there was definitely a performance-hit compared to Linux, and it was also hot and loud.

I may give Leap a go with Plasma 5; power management is superior with KDE, in my experience, and as has been said, Plasma 5 is pretty quick and resource-efficient these days.

I like Mate` as well (reminds me of my old favorite, Gnome 2) but for me, when I used openSUSE, Dolphin was the king of file managers - it can do so much, plus the whole KDE plasma 5 package was just slick. I had the occasional crash of a single app/widget, but no show stoppers. And Yast is just awesome.

I love DWM but not openBSD. I have a customized config.h (who doesn't, lol) and liked the lighteness and simplicity. Tiling WMs always bug me after a while and I end up going back to CWM, my all time favorite.

My foray into openBSD went badly: graphical performance on my monitor was terrible, almost like I was running in software mode, even though that didn't apply to cwm. I did learn later that this is normal. Sorry openBSD folks, not OK for me.

1 members found this post helpful.

Btrfs isn't all that great, Red Hat chucked it and I'm surprised that SUSE have stuck with it.

ext4 is ok for a desktop or laptop computer but not of any real use for servers - hence the SUSE/openSUSE offerings I suppose...?

ZoL seems to be where it's going and even FreeBSD has moved it's ZFS to be based on ZoL (effectively combining/pooling their efforts and looking to improve portability at the same time - the jury is out on that one).

Anyway, that's probably not what you were asking. I suppose the short version is that if there was the option to install on ext4, you might have taken that or even XFS which is certainly robust enough, though not sure what performance issues could arise there.

File systems like ZFS, Btrfs and HAMMER/HAMMER2 will always come with some "overhead" and not really advantageous for a desktop user.

1 members found this post helpful.

That was the killer for me, too; I live in the browser, mostly, and even having allocated as much as needed to Firefox, performance was awful. That, and the noise/heat issue.

2 members found this post helpful.

Opensuse gives you quite a wide choice of file system but for some reason defaults to btrfs. I've never tried but I do know you see quite a few complaints about partition filling up with snapshots.

I stick with ext4 and am happy with opensuse, which I find fast enough for me and not at all bloated as I have a wide choice of packages and can choose not tohave the ones I don't want.

So the answer to the op's question is "yes" (for me).

1 members found this post helpful.

It's a test bed for their commercial product range, so it probably makes sense for them to expose Btrfs wherever possible.