So I haven’t done any distro hopping for a long time. I’ve settled on Arch Linux as my daily driver some 7-8 years ago and despite it feeling a little overwhelming at times, I quite enjoyed the challenges it provides as opportunities to learn more about how computers work. I’m in no way a professional IT guy, just interested in the subject and use my computer for pretty mundane taskst, such as office work, internet browsing, media consumption, a bit of gaming and photo editing.
I liked the way Arch lets you pick your own destiny and I can pick which software I like best on each level, from boot loader, to display manager to desktop environment. I use KDE plasma, for example, but don’t like their default text-editor very much, so I don’t have to install it and can just use gedit instead.
I’m happy with my main machine running Arch, but I have two other machines that I don’t use very regularly, and maintaining those in Arch, even running the regular rolling release updates is impractical, so I decided to switch them to a different distro. One is an old laptop, that I use in a different room for my Online Pen&Paper Sessions, the other is an abomination of spare parts, at my parents house, (I call it Frankenstein’s PC, with an old AMD Athlon CPU and 4 Gigs of RAM), that I only use on occasional visits, if I have to absolutely do something that is too annoying to do on my phone.
Would openSUSE Leap be a good pick for these use cases? What advantages does it have to offer? What do you think I will enjoy or find annoying, coming from Arch?
I’d be happy to read about your experiences, opinions and suggestions.
Add a network share, mount /var/cache/pacman on each Arch machine. Download once, install many.
I don’t know if that would be practical. I’m not aiming to clone my system. Those machines have vastly different hardware capabilities and use-cases. Also I know much too little about networking at all and one of those machines (the Frankenstein’s Computer) is in a completely different household, so i’d have to sync it over the internet.
But maybe you can elaborate a bit and explain why that might work well for me.
All it does is share the package cache across all the systems.
Any time any Arch system goes to install a package, it checks if that package is already in the cache before downloading a new one.
At home, I’ve got several Arch systems across bare metal and virtual machines, and they all share a cache.
The first one to update the kernel takes a couple minutes to download the package. The second through ninth systems take zero seconds to download that package.
As for different needs, you’re right in that the overlap isn’t going to be perfect, systems with unique purposes will need to download each non-overlapping package. But the overlap is substantial. The kernel, the base system, ssh, python, all the standard utilities, there’s no reason to redownload all of that.
Since yours are in different households, though, there will be even less benefit there.
Instead, I’d recommend Ansible’s community.general.pacman (or some combination)