I'm not going to tqke these in 'posting order' and be aware that I have more experience of openSUSE than Manjaro...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zdenko
6. I recently (and extremely briefly) downloaded OpenSuse Tumbleweed and installed it. To the best of my knowledge, this is supposed to be the latest/rolling version. However, it came with KDE 4. I am certain that Plasma 5.5 (my preference) can be installed. But that makes me feel like OpenSuse is likely to have longer waiting times for things to come through compared to Manjaro, which comes with Plasma already.
|
If you really want 'bleeding edge', with all the trials and tribulations that it can entail, my guess is Manjaro is better at that than openSUSE. Tumbleweed has a relative minority of openSUSE users and they will expect you to be pretty pro-active in helping to cure that bugs that you turn up (as, to an extent, will Manjaro), so it isn't really the beginner-friendly option, unless, eg, you are an old-time Unix user with a bit of a hinterland.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zdenko
I
2. Manjaro seems to have more software available (benefitting from Arch repositories as well as its own).
|
There is a lot of software available for oS, but you do have to root around for it, for stuff that isn't mainstream. EG, individuals publish their own repos, pacman, etc, etc. So, one of the first bits of knowledge you would need is how to work the system...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zdenko
3. Manjaro's support forums are run by Arch gurus who discuss things at a level too high up for most beginners, which might make it hard to get going/understand how to solve problems.
|
Everything is at too high a level for beginners
Good beginners learn quickly, others don't (and the 'I know all about computers, because I know all the windows tricks' beginners are hardest to turn around).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zdenko
1. OpenSuse has a user-friendlier guides for beginners available.
|
That probably used to be true, and I'm not sure how true it is now. There used to be a series of excellent 'dead tree ware' books, but I haven't seen any of them for years (maybe still avail...but it used to be that the people who sold 'boxed sets' of software would frequently sell them, and those boxed sets still exist, but I don't know anyone who sells them). Online, there are a lot of wiki pages, and good as they are, they are 'one page per subject' wiki pages, which means an amount of 'search fu' is needed, and they don't make an easy 'I'll read one of the guides' experience.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zdenko
4. On YouTube I've seen (sorry: forgot links, but if forced I'll find them) the Manjaro team openly state an ambition to support gaming as best they can (do OpenSuse?) and I heard Manjaro does well in benchmarks in this regard. Dunno about OpenSuse in that respect.
|
The first thing you need is the appropriate support for your graphics card, at least for that kind of gaming. I can't help you further with that, but you probably should try posting the details, to see if someone can.
In perf benchmarks, I'm not convinced that there are worthwhile sustainable differences between different linux distros set up in the same way (at least, I've looked at them for years, and not found much evidence). That hides a number of things:
when a revised kernel comes out it can improve or worsen perf in a number of areas. The rapid adopters get that first and the slow adopters last. Overall, I see that as a wash.
Different distros take different defaults: you don't have to take the default for your distro, and when I say 'set up in the same way' I mean with these factors equalised. The issue of disk perf can be particularly intractable. but if take, say, BTRFS, over EXT4 that will be faster in some things and slower in others, and overall, there are probably more slow-downs than speed-ups (and, even that depends on a host of things).
So, why would you take BTRFS over EXT4? Because it offers some extra facilities (even if it does seem 'nearly finished' for ever). So, when your distro takes the decision of which one is going to be the default (or XFS...or F2FS in some circumstances, or one of nearly a dozen other candidates), or the decisions about how those should be configured they are taking a series of big decisions which you may not understand fully until months after you have installed or even then.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zdenko
6. I recently (and extremely briefly) downloaded OpenSuse Tumbleweed and installed it. To the best of my knowledge, this is supposed to be the latest/rolling version. However, it came with KDE 4. I am certain that Plasma 5.5 (my preference) can be installed. But that makes me feel like OpenSuse is likely to have longer waiting times for things to come through compared to Manjaro, which comes with Plasma already.
|
I'm sure I saw a discussion of plasma versions being available for Tumbleweed some time ago - actually it was 'Tumbleweed has this relatively recent version of plasma, Leap has this older (and worse/buggier) version of plasma...when will it be fixed?' and that probably wasn't going to resolved in the short term, without either a personal repo version or a security bug in the Leap version of Plasma such that a, err, leap in Leap version had to be made.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zdenko
5. I'm very conscious that several programs I use are distributed by their respective companies for Linux only as .deb files. In (K)ubuntu this is no problem. But how would switching to OpenSuse or Manjaro help me deal with this?
I found at least one video showing that .deb can be converted to Arch-compatible stuff ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZvjXnI_eTU). Can the equivalent thing be done for OpenSuse?
For example: I used SpiderOak. Their Linux versions are for Debian ((K)ubuntu compatible), Slackware and Fedora. How would that work on OpenSuse? Could I convert any of these to OpenSuse-friendly? |
There is a program (alien) that exists to do that, but it is probably worth avoiding.
Most of these '.deb' only things are nothing of the kind; there usually is a set of source code that
could be compiled, but the questions are 'has someone done it for you' and 'how easy is it if you have to do it yourself (for example, is there documentation)? You also see the '.rpm' only thing, but that is often something that is only supported on Red Hat and for enterprise apps, but you could compile it, but that wouldn't get you support, so may not be worth doing.
