So I haven’t done any distro hopping for a long time. I’ve settled on Arch Linux as my daily driver some 7-8 years ago and despite it feeling a little overwhelming at times, I quite enjoyed the challenges it provides as opportunities to learn more about how computers work. I’m in no way a professional IT guy, just interested in the subject and use my computer for pretty mundane taskst, such as office work, internet browsing, media consumption, a bit of gaming and photo editing.
I liked the way Arch lets you pick your own destiny and I can pick which software I like best on each level, from boot loader, to display manager to desktop environment. I use KDE plasma, for example, but don’t like their default text-editor very much, so I don’t have to install it and can just use gedit instead.
I’m happy with my main machine running Arch, but I have two other machines that I don’t use very regularly, and maintaining those in Arch, even running the regular rolling release updates is impractical, so I decided to switch them to a different distro. One is an old laptop, that I use in a different room for my Online Pen&Paper Sessions, the other is an abomination of spare parts, at my parents house, (I call it Frankenstein’s PC, with an old AMD Athlon CPU and 4 Gigs of RAM), that I only use on occasional visits, if I have to absolutely do something that is too annoying to do on my phone.
Would openSUSE Leap be a good pick for these use cases? What advantages does it have to offer? What do you think I will enjoy or find annoying, coming from Arch?
I’d be happy to read about your experiences, opinions and suggestions.
Yes, all of the above - but I would offer Tumbleweed recommendation due to it’s rolling releases, it’s just always fairly up-to-date-ish (the out-of-sync happens but imhe it’s fine, eg I wait for nVidia drivers an additional week), no major releases to fiddle with yet still a neatly thought-out package (it’s my daily driver but also what I put on the machines of family & friends bcs I just have no maintenance issues anymore, it’s been years now).
Seems OP uses these computers very sporadically. Tumbleweed gets pretty much as many updates as Arch.
Yes, but tumbleweed doesn’t care how long the span has been, its a snapshot of all the packages needed
Fair enough. I personally hate turning up my computer and being greeted with 1000+ updates even if I know the outcome won’t be disastrous.