My journey with Arch Linux began almost two decades ago. Back then, SUSE didn’t have a rolling release, and I found the frequent version updates of the “Leap” distributions incredibly annoying. To this day, I still think Arch is the coolest distro out there. Between the power of the AUR and community-maintained repos like archlinuxcn and archedu, it’s a remarkably convenient daily driver. Plus, the community is vibrant, the ArchWiki is arguably the best resource for learning Linux, and let’s be honest—the logo is just cooler.
Despite all that, I switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed a year ago. OpenSUSE is simply more “plug-and-play” for modern hardware: Secure Boot and Trusted Boot are easy to configure, and pcr-oracle makes the whole setup seamless. The Snapper integration is a massive safety net, and YaST remains a powerhouse of utility. They even offer “Slowroll” if you want a more tempered rolling experience.
Everything is great—except for Packman. Honestly, Packman is a nightmare. You’re forced to use it for codecs just to get hardware acceleration in mpv, but it often lags behind the main repositories. This leads to broken updates and that infamous “this-is-only-for-build-envs” conflict.