It seems like its a perfect distro. Rolling release so you get recent packages and dont have huge upgrades every few months, but not so bleeding edge that it breaks often. YaST is pretty cool but you are not forced to use it. Basic installation gives you enough essential stuff, but its not too bloated. The only thing its missing is AUR, but i still didnt find a program that i need and cant find in official repos or trough flatpak.
Honestly, now that i use it, it seems like insanity to install anything else. (for everyday desktop use)
I like TW a lot but it’s not what I would recommend to newbies. The patterns system is dumb and constantly installs needless crap by default if you don’t know how to deal with it. Last I’ve checked (disclaimer: it’s been a while) the PackageKit-Zypper back-end was severely broken and there were no attempts to fix it because everyone uses zypper CLI anyway. If you are a somewhat experienced user, dealing with the quirks is not much of an issue and the long term benefits of getting an extremely robust rolling release distribution far outweigh the downsides but for newbies something like Fedora is a much better choice.
Just a quick note, I generally use the packagekit backend (via Plasma Discover) and it works fine the vast majority of the time (including taking snapshots).
The only time I’ve seen problems with it is when user intervention is required, e.g. if there’s some conflict on upgrade. Discover, at least, seems to silently fail, at which point I hit the terminal and do
sudo zypper dup.I’m not sure if Yast works better, as I prefer Discover since it integrates (mostly) seamlessly with Plasma, and using the CLI doesn’t bother me. I could see it being an issue for somebody who wants things to “just work” and/or is not well-versed in Linux. So, I agree that it may not be ideal for newbies; just wanted to give some info on the current packagekit status.
The issue that bit me most often was that I usually do my package management from command line but when the updater checked for updates in the background zypper printed a message along the line of “PackageKit is blocking the database. Want to ask PackageKit to quit doing that?” and Yes just did nothing. At some point I just made a Google Doc with a set of commands after a fresh installation (because a proper script is too professional😁) and removing anything PackageKit is among those commands.
Better as in directly doing package management on its own: yes. Better in terms of usability: no. I use Yast to remove those stupid patterns because doing that with zypper removes all software in that pattern as well.