I use tumbleweed. Mostly just works. Sometimes, you have to go look for packages that are named differently than in other distros.

Works fine for me, mostly.

You go zypper inr and it should install what is essential. The rest are in the repos, but you’ll have to make a bit of search due to weird naming conventions. Luckily, zypper search exists.

Overall, it’s be much less painful than Debian, but significantly more involved compared to gaming distros like Bazzite, CachyOS, and Nobara.

It’s not built for it. You’ll have to install all the special packages yourself, but they’re at least in the first party repos and frequently updated. For a build-a-bear gaming OS it is probably one of the better ones because of bleeding edge bins and lots of gaming tools in their repos. Unless you are sticking with official proton only, you’re gonna have to use protonqt or some other method of keeping your proton variant of choice up to date like you would on popos or most other distros.

A lot of convenience things are missing for me. I actually avoid using the system because it’s such a pain in the ass without hdmi 2.1 support built in. Earlier tonight I was updating it after not touching it for a few weeks and the updater app appeared to freeze and so did something somewhere in the video stack. I had about 7GB of updates that totaled nearly 3000, so it wasn’t a small amount of updates. I waited ~15 minutes and it did ultimately manage to reboot and re-checking updates showed everything was up to date despite the instability during the process. I was really hoping hdmi 2.1 support had released, but not yet.

I don’t know how cachyos does it, but if I throw my cachyos box into the exact same display setup cable and all, it recognizes hdr and 120hz @ 4k. They have to do some kernel tweaks for that. I am stuck with 1080p@120hz or 4k@30hz otherwise in opensuse. I picked up a displayport to hdmi adapter that claims to support 8k@60hz or 4k@240hz but it still only shows up as 4k@30hz capable in opensuse with a 6800xt, cachyos sees it as 4k@60hz or 4k@120hz depending on how much screwing around with it I do.

OpenSUSE has some pretty awesome enterprise management tools though, and they’re all built-in and included side by side with the user settings. If I was building out linux workstations at work at substantial scale i’d put it at the top one to try because of how powerful the built-in stuff appears to be for RMM.

I went to opensuse from pop and pop sucks by comparison (tried before and after COSMIC release.) Pop was always a bit out of date because they relied on ubuntu bins that were just not quickly updated. If pop was old, debian by comparison is a fossil. OpenSUSE is as modern as it comes though.

I built a system for a buddy four or five months ago and he was willing to go and try linux for gaming. Fairly high end, 9850x3d, 9070xt. He never used linux before. He’s still using cachyos and totally happy with it. I don’t think he’d still be using debian, fedora, endeavourOS or even opensuse.

If you’re using Nvidia graphics I suggest this piece of documentation for driver installation.

Essentially if you’re running Debian 13 (Trixie) then run these commands;

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ trixie-security contrib non-free main non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-updates non-free-firmware non-free contrib main

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt full-upgrade -y

sudo apt install linux-headers-generic nvidia-kernel-dkms nvidia-driver
nvidia-cuda-dev nvidia-cuda-toolkit

sudo apt autoclean
sudo apt autoremove -y
sudo reboot

Optional for RTX graphics cards, this enables the ray-tracing engine.

sudo apt install libnvoptix1

Just remember to disable secureboot if you haven’t already, otherwise the driver module will fail to start when you boot your computer likely throwing the kernel into a panic.