So I’ve started this wild wild OpenSUSE ride and already posted some initial impressions and gripes I had. Some problems were just too annoying for me so I decided to reinstall and go with OpenSUSE Leap instead.

In initial impressions article I’ve noted that backlight is not persisted accross the reboots. It seems that Leap has no such issues. It persisted backlight percentage on reboot, no issues whatsoever.

It also seems to that the wifi re-connection is quite faster. It still takes good 5 seconds or so, but now it is at least tolerable. Still not fast as other distros I regularly use (Ubuntu and Fedora namely).

Unfortunately, boot speed is still slow as hell. That’s just bad but it is what it is. I can deal with it every so often I reboot the machine, I guess… If for nothing else, it will force me to get up and stretch a bit :-)

That being said, Leap is the stable distribution based on SLES, and that means it has made deliberate choices to stick with LTS software. By default it comes preinstalled with Firefox 78 ESR, which is a bit dated, or at least it looks so, as opposed to the current Firefox 84. Tried to solve this one by installing Firefox from Flatpak but hit a snag with flatpak/flatpak Issue #3942

Apparently Flatpak isn’t as polished on LTS distributions such as Leap yet as it is on distributions that are a bit more current.

Anyhow, now that I’m on Leap, I no longer think I can handle a few outdated things here and there. I like to stay reasonably current. And it’s not just due to the Firefox version, it’s the small things all around. Additional example being KDE, which is pinned at the LTS version and thus new fancy things such as better settings grouping and similar new features are not available.

Something between OpenSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed, but stable, without so much weird things, would be ideal for me :-)

At this point I’m seriously re-thinking my life choices and contemplating why I even started this “OpenSUSE challenge”. Hopefully those rough edges won’t push me over the edge :-)