Linux

I would like to ask if openSuse Tumbleweed is a good option for daily driving ang gaming.

Definitely! Depending on your hardware configuration and the games you play, it might even give you a significant performance boost. For completeness' sake, it's important to note that most of the (potential) gains in performance are related to having a more recently released kernel. So similar gains would have been had simply by using something like Arch or Fedora. Furthermore, other factors -like scheduler, custom kernel patches for additional performance and how the packages have been compiled etc- are perhaps also avenues worth exploring in that regard. However that's a potential can of worms I would rather keep closed in this discussion.

Furthermore, openSUSE Tumbleweed comes with great defaults, which is in clear contrast to Arch that comes with (little to) no defaults. This makes it significantly easier to just install and get on with business, something which you might be already familiar with if you've used Linux Mint and Ubuntu. However, compared to those, openSUSE Tumbleweed might require you to perform some additional steps related to codecs and whatnot. This is nothing out of the ordinary as Fedora would have required it as well. Out of 'the big bois', only Ubuntu has been able to solve this through a single-click during installation. Note; this is not a technical matter but a legal one. Thankfully, openSUSE offers great documentation to solve this as smoothly as possible.

Perhaps it's worth mentioning that openSUSE Tumbleweed, contrary to all the other distros that have been mentioned, is configured with Snapper+Btrfs out of the box. This is IMO a must-have on any reliable system as it allows one to rollback to a working system whenever your system seems to have been borked somehow. The other distros allow you to set this (or similar solutions) up yourself, however openSUSE is the only one that does this for you. Furthermore, if security is of any concern to you, but you're not that knowledgeable on the subject, thus requiring your distro to do the heavy-lifting, then once again openSUSE Tumbleweed (together with Fedora) performs best out of 'the big bois'.

After mentioning such praise one might ask "What's the catch?", because -somehow- openSUSE Tumbleweed isn't as represented in the online discourse compared to Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. And honestly, I don't know why it is so criminally underrated. So in that regard, it's quite unfortunate that it can't quite reap the benefits of having a huge involved community like the others have. And perhaps that's where the catch is...; it doesn't have as big of a user base -> limited user base isn't able to contribute to it so that it becomes as 'competitive' as the more popular distros -> potential new users don't pick or stick to openSUSE because package/function X (or whatever) is absent -> it doesn't have as big of a user base... To give an example; I really like to have a secure system. And while openSUSE is one of the best to offer that out of the box, it unfortunately doesn't allow me to further harden it by installing a hardened kernel without myself becoming the maintainer of said package. This is in clear contrast to Arch, Debian and Fedora that offer access to repos that contain a hardened kernel; be it through the AUR, COPR or the repo maintained by the folks over at Kicksecure.

The graphics card I have is Nvidia if its any relevant.

Perhaps openSUSE Tumbleweed will require you to put in more effort -compared to Ubuntu- to make sure this works as intended. However, thankfully, the documentation has got you covered.

Yeah, it'll be perfectly fine. You'll probably want to stick to the Steam flatpak for gaming (personal preference), but it shouldn't be much different than Ubuntu experience. Nvidia set up is usually the most annoying part, but that's less the fault of the distro and entirely of Nvidia.

I've got mad respect for SUSE. They've always played fair with open source. But I found Arch to be ideal for gaming. I may get down voted but Arch plays all my Steam games excellently. Granted I haven't tried openSUSE out for that kind of thing. My last two remaining client from my business, a doctor and an attorney, I have using openSUSE on their laptops and desktops. They use SUSE Linux Enterprise on the server. It's fucking bulletproof. The Maytag of Linux. I'm thinking about killing my free Alma Linux Oracle VM and putting SLES or openSUSE in its place. I like the direction SUSE is headed.

I use Tumbleweed for this exact purpose, and I love every second of it! It's been my choice distro for a while now, and put a definitive end to my distro hopping. I can't speak to how using Nvidia with it will work as I've always run AMD, but Steam runs beautifully!

Tumbleweed is fine for gaming. I daily drive it for three years now and cant complain much.

Just as a note, if you cant connect to external devices check the firewall first, you might need to open ports. YaST has a module for that, no need for Terminal foo.

Dont go and use too many OBS Repos (via opi), it is possible to run into conflicts sooner than later.

If you cant find your desired software check flatpak or appimage, distrobox is another option.

I prefer Fedora but OpenSUSE is a great distro too, rolling releases just tend to need a little more troubleshooting and I really like the middleground.

I have used Tumbleweed prior as a daily driver with an Nvidia 1050ti. From memory, you will have to enable a repo, and that's about it. openSUSE also has YaST which will help significantly with managing this sort of stuff for your install. The gaming experience on openSUSE was pretty much issueless for me.

Tumbleweed is rolling release so just make sure you snapshot your system once before an update and once after just Incase something goes wrong

I switched, after years of running Mint, to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as a daily driver. It's very good and I'd recommend trying it. I like the way it's kept so up to date but very seldom has problems, and if an update introduces an issue it's easy to roll back.

You should be aware that the standard way to update Tumbleweed is "sudo zypper dup" and not whatever the GUI offers. Also you will need to enable one extra repository to get additional codecs.

Also note that you may occasionally need "sudo zypper dup --allow-vendor-change" to resolve dependency issues when package A depends on a version of package B that is only available in a different repository from the one from which you have previously installed B.

The only other thing I've found is that the Discover app will show you some packages as being available only in Flatpak form, and those don't get updated through the usual zypper process (I think). So you need to do "flatpak update" to get those updates.

Flatpaks can be a challenge to get working with each other (since they don't have access to all system resources) so it can be helpful to install flatseal to tweak them. But also some packages that Discover will offer as Flatpak only are actually available in RPM format if you search around (and sometimes enable a third party repository), and RPMs can be easier to get working with other software (though Flatpak's sandboxing is a good thing). The site software.opensuse.org is one place you can consult.

You can also install Snaps when you can't find an appropriate RPM or Flatpak.

Steam runs without problems on my machine and I can play many games.

Look up the process for rolling back to a btrfs snapshot using snapper, because it is reassuring to have this as an emergency recovery measure.

I'm not using NVIDIA but from what I've read most people don't find it to be a problem.

Well opensuse only ships open source driver and that can be an issue with some nivida cards. That said you can install you own drivers

Ye, I used it once and didn't like it cause it was green by default. I was still in middle school. Anyways I've only heard good things from opensuse

Some may say arch, due to.bleeding edge nature for drivers and stuff

Pop os and have out of the box nvidia support

Using nvidia with Arch is super simple. Just select the nvidia proprietary drivers during installation (archinstall), and it's done. It is great for gaming, steam is available in the multilib repository (enable it during the installation with archinstall). It is pretty much ready to go after the installation. You might have heard that it is super hard to install, but that is if you install it manually (without archinstall). Haven't tried suse myself, so I can't talk about it, but I can definitely recommend Arch, not only for gaming but for daily driving as well. Having the AUR spared me the headaches I had back when I used mint and fedora, and programs weren't available in the distro repository.

I dont know anything of Linux Gaming because nothing works, on my GPU, or whatever, somehow it doesnt work this is probably a WINE thing.

So Proton and all are sometimes working less well as Flatpak, which would stand against Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite and so on. OpenSuse doesnt care about KDE so microOS KDE will always be buggy it seems.

I use Kinoite and will probably never switch. Its pretty great, up to date, secure, with rollback...