Edit: And in the end, it's back to good old Fedora with Xfce. I guess I'm an old man, fixed in my ways. Haiku was interesting, but not nearly as stable as needed. OpenSuSE with Xfce was rough, it requires more polish.
I've been a Fedora Linux user for a million years by now, and I haven't touched any other OS (outside of Windows 10 and 11 at work).
Lately I got a refurbished ThinkCentre from ca 2018 (7th generation Intel i5, 16GB RAM, Intel HD 630). The initial idea was to use it as a media PC but the small form factor ended up not being small enough for my living room.
Now I'm thinking of using it as a desktop PC for a while, to see if it can make my laptop be a portable machine again instead of always plugged, always on. If it doesn't work out, I'll use it as a home server.
Since this is all an experiment, I want to give a new OS a shot before I settle for the familiar Fedora.
OpenSuSE is the first on my list, but even from the LiveUSB I noticed that the software selection is more limited than I'm used to.
I'm thinking of giving HaikuOS a shot as well.
What else has been going on in the world of free OSes since 2007? What's one that you are excited about?
Did you check the opensuse community repos? Search here: https://software.opensuse.org/ - lots of stuff that isn't included in the core / official.
Looking again, it seems like more packages are available for the Tumbleweed stream, compared to Leap. I was testing Leap.
Tumbleweed is generally the place to be. I think it is easier to target for packagers and is the basis for most of the interesting stuff going on in the distro. The immutable versions (now named Aeon and Kalpa) use something like a stripped down Tumbleweed at the core, with applications mostly containerized. Think tight rolling core that has strong automated tests and rather safe, with applications mostly isolated in Flatpak to prevent library conflicts and such.
Yeah, and also Leap is going away due to SUSE rebasing SLE on their proposed ALP, which will essentially be the downstream of Aeon and Kalpa.
Tumbleweed is still the way to go for general desktop use. Can be fun to experiment with the others, though.