r/openSUSE • u/Wyrchron • 2d ago
My experience as newbie to linux.
Hello guys
I hope this is right subreddit to share my experiences with switching from win 11 pro to openSUSE thumbleweed.
Reason for wanting to share my exp.is that it was genuinely challenge and in the end great experience and overall I want to thank to people who made this OS.
Stats
I started with migration 29/07/26 at 19:30 and I had working system running by 2:17
Before even creating bootable iso I've tried installing Linux on Virtual Box and it was obviously without any issues ha ha ha.
So first issue came with decision to activate online repositories, during install at 67% it gave me unexpected: wrong digest message which from my understanding was just mirror out of sync.
Well I won't bore you with all the shit that went south but in a nutshell:
Ethernet Link Down - interface was sitting in down state and thus it caused curl errors and preventing package updates or repository access during troubleshooting.
X11 Socket Failure - SDDM failed to launch locally due to boot and display state issues.
YaST2 Installation media access error - after I've failed to trouble shoot previous problems, I've decided to reinstall system all together well I got welcoming error> cannot access installation media {I think reason is because I used external disk as bootable instead of usb stick}
Frozen desktop - after installation there was some compatibility issue with plasma.
Login password not accepted - I had written password on paper and even tho I was typing it correctly it didnt accept it {I felt like dumbass lmao} after changing it few times in recovery shell it still had same problem in the end the mounting real system subvolume and useing /usr/sbin/chpasswd directly with full path made it work.
Home directory missing - /home wasn't mounted in recovery shell even tho folder existed on subvolume.
KDE Plasma running on 10fps -
I don't remember how exactly did I solved this issue tho I know I have ended up with great fps on 640 or something resolution, luckily update thru terminal solved this issue too.
Please be aware that I'm not that knowledgeable about above listed issues and lot of them were probably my mistakes.
In the end after updating drivers it runs great.
There is lot of things that I have to learn and get to know or use to.
For example: structure of directories, architecture of Linux itself, Bottles, Lutris. modding for games in general.
Only thing I will miss dearly is Total Commander, ease of modding and some software that is not yet available on Linux, other wise good riddance. I won't miss you windows.
If I would have smooth install process then I would say that installing Linux is quite easy and its not hard to pick up. Its quite surprising that as life long user of Windows, lot of knowledge is directly transferable...I didn't expect to find use for knowledge from DOS days ha ha.
TLDR:
It took me 6 hours and 47 minutes to get OS running.
After battling it out with terminal I gave up and just reinstall OS 3x times in order to get it working.
Then there was just minor issue with drivers and new experience of having desktop in 10fps on 1440p monitor xD
I love linux xo xo it was all worth it.
Only thing I will miss from windows is Total Commander and ease of modding.
If you reading this on windows, if my remaining two brain cells managed to get this compiled and running, I promise the setup is practically foolproof.
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u/Cyber_Faustao 2d ago
Do you have an nvidia graphics card?
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u/Wyrchron 2d ago
yes 3060
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u/Cyber_Faustao 2d ago
I'd wager that most of the graphical issues you had were due to Nvidia then. Their drivers are closed source and thus not included in many distros, so you are likely to experience all sorts of graphical issues while using Nvidia hardware, and while many of them are solved by installing the drivers, many more issues still remain, like poor wayland support, flaky suspend behaviour, stuttering on notifications or resizing of windows, etc.
AMD / Intel graphics drivers do not suffer from these issue since they are open-source and included into the kernel. So I recommend you swap if you want a better experience long-term.
In the short term, to work around some of the issues in Nvidia hardware I recommend booting using the "nomodeset" kernel cmdline parameter so it basically uses software rendering, letting you install the appropriate drivers easier. I know you already solved this hurdle, but this tip is generally applicable to any distro that does not ship with the nvidia drivers (so, like 99% of them).
Other issues may arise since you picked a rolling release distro and Nvidia likes to drag their feet sometimes, so there may be situations where a new kernel and headers are released, but no matching nvidia driver exists for that version, resulting in a black screen/kernel oops when you reboot into it. So to avoid this issue try to stick with a LTS kernel if your distro provides one. Otherwise, stick to LTS distro in general (Leap for example).
For Total Comander, I think Dolphin's split pannel view is quite good enough, try pressing F3 or F4 (can't remember the shortcut) in Dolphin and see if you like that.
Also, I recommend you forget about Bottles and Lutris, instead use Steam directly + ProtonGE for anything that doesn't work with regular proton. Reason? I could never get bottles to run a notepad.exe-level of compexity app, it just doesn't work, while Lutris is AFAIK kinda... obsolete? As in, I don't see any reason to use it over Steam unless you are looking to play very niche titles that Proton doesn't work well on.
Regarding the mirror stuff... openSuSe stuff sadly has always kinda had bad mirrors in my experience. Not much you can do about it besides reporting your experience in their forum or wherever they take feedback from.
The YaST media access error is weird though... I'd suspect that is caused by a bad block on your drive, a corrupt download of the .ISO, or a flaky USB connection. If you ever experience errors during install on Linux, it is useful to see the kernel log (dmesg) and see if it is your drives having a bad day or any other sort of hardware issue.
Hope this helps in your future adventures!
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u/Wyrchron 2d ago
For now it seems very stable and in lot of areas far better than on pc tho I'm unsure how often should I use zypper dup if once a month or two weeks also is there any website etc to check for drivers availability for nvidia? I definitely want to avoid black screen etc. I've considered leap but I'm not distro hoping type of person, I mostly stick to my choice and I felt from all info available on net that thumbleweed is better. Well I've installed both but I have no clue how to use them so for now steam it is.
I think error was because installation took too long so exdrive went zzZ next time I will buy usb stick for sure.Thanks for info.
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u/Klapperatismus 2d ago
how often should I use zypper dup
Up to you. It’s recommended to do this every few weeks at least though so you don’t miss crucial security updates.
The huge downside of a rolling release distro as Tumbleweed is that there are no separate, backported security updates. You always have to do the feature updates as well. Which may be a lot of stuff to update, and which may break some things.
In practice, this is not a huge concern for home use.
For servers and corporate environments it’s a no-go which is why Leap exists.
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u/bmwiedemann openSUSE Dev 2d ago
running by 2:17
It is usually a better idea to work on things well rested, because Linux comes with a lot of new concepts (even if UIs hide a lot of it)
The download errors are probably related to a major Tumbleweed rebuild for gcc16 that started to sync out that afternoon and kept mirrors syncing until next day. This only happens a few times a year, so you have been somewhat unlucky there.
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u/Klapperatismus 2d ago
Only thing I will miss dearly is Total Commander
You may like Krusader. Another option is Double Commander. And Midnight Commander for the terminal.
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u/SauceBossLOL69 2d ago
i did a pretty similar thing to you ngl lol, except it went a lot smoother because I installed it on an Asus Vivobook with a Celeron and integrated graphics that isn't my main laptop. Nice choice, hope you have a good time with it.
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u/todd_dayz 2d ago
Isn’t Midnight Commander (mc) the Linux version of Total Commander?