I concur there’s a good trend, unfortunately it still takes some time to get there. About OpenSuse, to get the stuff out of the way they’re currently working on:
Better, more friendly installer (Agama)
Stable and Modern Software, not either/or (Slowroll)
That’s definitely good. Their default website for the preinstalled browser also includes all the community links as well as a search, leading people to stuff like the Forum which is indeed very friendly (definitely not hostile like f.e. the Arch forum). They also tick a lot of boxes basically no one else does with the bootable system snapshots and (almost) full graphical system management with their YaST2 Suite (because nobody should be forced to manipulate god damn system config files with a command-line editor!).
My main gripes with OpenSuse are:
Flathub not added by default (especially when using Gnome)
This leaves new users with either no (Gnome) or a lackluster (KDE) amount of Software in the store. The concept of adding more software sources isn’t generally known, and new people have no clue what to look for. When using KDE they’d just assume there’s very little Software available in general.
Lackluster Onboarding Wizard…
It’s literally just a bunch of links. While one of the links leads to Documentation (as well as a Readme, but that thing is tiny), the docs are already extremely advanced and go into system details most people will have never heard of or will ever need. Examples of how to do this well do exist, like in Mint or Zorin.
…which should include a quick Snapshot settings menu
By default OpenSuse tries to save 10 snapshots per day, another 10 per month, 10 per year… it’s flooding your disk with snapshots eventually, and that you still can only change in a config file!
Making the Software Store properly update
It’s a necessity to know ‘sudo zypper dup’ since the Software Store more often than not fails to install system updates for some reason (especially with the Nvidia driver installed)
Include the Nvidia driver in the installer
While OpenSuse did a great job with reliable Nvidia driver packages, the manual install is still really bad. Distros like Pop!_OS solved this with a dedicated image, however OpenSuse got excellent installers that could auto-detect the necessity for the driver and/or offer it as an option.
Those are things that come to mind. There technically is lots of more stuff, but those wouldn’t be a distro- but more of KDE / GNOME problems (especially around stability). I really appreciate the OpenSuse team doing lots of good stuff, but there are some things a normal user (and by that I mean someone who can’t use the CLI to administrate a Linux by hand) can’t do, yet would be forced to either immediately or eventually. And yes, of course OpenSuse isn’t primarily marketed towards “normies”, that doesn’t mean all these things wouldn’t also be nice for sysadmins to be fixed.
I concur there’s a good trend, unfortunately it still takes some time to get there. About OpenSuse, to get the stuff out of the way they’re currently working on:
That’s definitely good. Their default website for the preinstalled browser also includes all the community links as well as a search, leading people to stuff like the Forum which is indeed very friendly (definitely not hostile like f.e. the Arch forum). They also tick a lot of boxes basically no one else does with the bootable system snapshots and (almost) full graphical system management with their YaST2 Suite (because nobody should be forced to manipulate god damn system config files with a command-line editor!). My main gripes with OpenSuse are:
This leaves new users with either no (Gnome) or a lackluster (KDE) amount of Software in the store. The concept of adding more software sources isn’t generally known, and new people have no clue what to look for. When using KDE they’d just assume there’s very little Software available in general.
It’s literally just a bunch of links. While one of the links leads to Documentation (as well as a Readme, but that thing is tiny), the docs are already extremely advanced and go into system details most people will have never heard of or will ever need. Examples of how to do this well do exist, like in Mint or Zorin.
By default OpenSuse tries to save 10 snapshots per day, another 10 per month, 10 per year… it’s flooding your disk with snapshots eventually, and that you still can only change in a config file!
It’s a necessity to know ‘sudo zypper dup’ since the Software Store more often than not fails to install system updates for some reason (especially with the Nvidia driver installed)
While OpenSuse did a great job with reliable Nvidia driver packages, the manual install is still really bad. Distros like Pop!_OS solved this with a dedicated image, however OpenSuse got excellent installers that could auto-detect the necessity for the driver and/or offer it as an option.
Those are things that come to mind. There technically is lots of more stuff, but those wouldn’t be a distro- but more of KDE / GNOME problems (especially around stability). I really appreciate the OpenSuse team doing lots of good stuff, but there are some things a normal user (and by that I mean someone who can’t use the CLI to administrate a Linux by hand) can’t do, yet would be forced to either immediately or eventually. And yes, of course OpenSuse isn’t primarily marketed towards “normies”, that doesn’t mean all these things wouldn’t also be nice for sysadmins to be fixed.