Okay, I admit it; I have a distro-hopping problem. It was only three months ago that I proudly declared that I had stopped jumping between Linux distros and settled on one, and yet the bug has bitten me once more. The weird thing is, this isn’t even a ‘the grass is greener on the other side’ thing, because as far as I was concerned, my Fedora Kinoite-based grass was some of the greenest I had ever had. I suppose when you’re given a buffet of stellar and free operating systems, you can help but snaffle a taste here and there, even when your plate is full.
This is a long way of me saying that I’ve put Fedora Kinoite on ice, stored it away on my D: drive, and installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on my C: drive instead. And man, it’s giving me second thoughts about using Fedora.
I’m in love with Snapper
I didn’t even need to set anything up
When you go to Paris, you visit the Eiffel Tower; when you’re in Rome, you check out the Colloseum; when you install openSUSE, you take a peek at Snapper. It’s one of the distro’s most widely-advertised feature in recommendation threads, and I can see why.
I didn’t have to touch Snapper at all during setup, and it kicked off making snapshots after every big change to my operating system. It even takes a snapshot the minute I go to update my system and one afterward so I could really pick and choose the exact moment I want to go back to. And the fact I can choose between these snapshots during boot is fantastic; it makes me feel like I’m on a really ironclad system.
Mozilla has a treat for Firefox fans on Fedora, openSUSE, and other RPM-based distros
Getting the Nightly build just got a lot easier.
I’m also a huge fan of YaST
Brings me back to the Control Panel days
Back when I was a Windows user in mid-2025, I really liked the Control Panel. Maybe it was the familiarity speaking, or perhaps I just prefer how Windows used to look over how it looks today, but I didn’t much support Microsoft’s decision to slowly gut the Control Panel and move everything to Settings. When I migrated to Fedora, there wasn’t much of a ‘central hub’ like the Control Panel, but I found my way around just fine.
openSUSE, on the other hand, has the Yet another Setup Tool (YaST). This does look and feel more like the old Windows Control Panel, and gives me easy access to tools like a boot loader editor and a partitioner. You can also invoke any of YaST’s tools independently if you want to skip opening the main window, but I do like the centralised toolset available to me.
I switched from GNOME to KDE Plasma 6.6 and it fixed all my complaints about the Linux desktop
It’s time to move on from GNOME
Things just tend to just work for me on openSUSE Tumbleweed
I was pleasantly surprised at how things worked out of the box
As much as I love Fedora Kinoite, there were two bugbears with it that I had to wrestle with it. The first is with my cloud PC software, Shadow. Every time I reinstalled Fedora, I had to go through a process of manually adding my user account to the input and xinput groups and then restarting my PC. If I didn’t, my cloud app wouldn’t show my cursor moving on the host PC, even though I could still click on things.
I also had a problem with reporting crashes to KDE. Whenever the little crash report window appeared, clicking ‘send report’ would just give me an error message. No matter what fixes I tried and workarounds I attempted, I couldn’t actually report my problems, which felt pretty bad.
openSUSE didn’t have either of these problems. Shadow showed me cursor without any additional tweaks, and I can now report bugs just fine. They weren’t strictly dealbreakers for Fedora Kinoite, but it was nice to see that openSUSE let me use it the way I wanted without any additional tweaks.
I installed NixOS on my daily driver, but I went back to Fedora in a week
It’s the most enjoyable, customizable nightmare I’ve ever had
I think I’ve finally settled on my forever OS (again)
It’s still early days with myself and Geeko the Chameleon. So far, I haven’t had much reason to go back to Fedora Kinoite, and openSUSE Tumbleweed builds upon the already-stellar experience I was having with Fedora’s distro.
In fact, I don’t want this piece to come off as me saying that Fedora is strictly worse than openSUSE. If I had a distro rating scale ranging from 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘never want to use it again’ and 10 being ‘daily driver,’ openSUSE Tumbleweed is currently a 10, and Fedora Kinoite a 9.8. We’re getting into the realm of OS comparison which ascends past comparing the main features of each one and instead becomes personal nitpicking. Regardless, I have embraced the chameleon, and I think I will do for a long time now. Well, at least until another shiny new OS distracts me.
