Hear me out, the mascot is a freaking chameleon, that’s cool as shit man.
Also it’s a German engineered distro, German engineering wins again!
Zypper is just a funnier name for a package manager and it has Tumbleweed which is arch but actually doesn’t break for once!
Your rebuttal?
My rebuttal is that I have never had arch not boot except me messing up the install 8 years ago when I was learning.
I installed a completely standard tubleweed install on a laptop, grub broke and tumbleweed wouldn’t boot anymore during the first update that was recommended to me through a notification popup that brought me to an update GUI. This was just 2 years ago.
Arch you can boot by default with rEFInd. It is infinitely easier than grub, searches and finds boots by default, even if it is configured incorrectly, and has never broken once in 8 years while grub has broken many, many times. That is not an option with tumbleweed install.
There have 100% been package and dependency breakages on tumbleweed, just like arch and every single distro. It happens.
Documentation is meager at best for tumbleweed and related. Archwiki is unbeatable in that regard.
The AUR. Please, try to go install niche programs like EdrawMax, PulseView, etc… RPMs make it pretty easy after you find it. On arch it is “yay pulseview” … “1” … “y” … Done.
They are all great distros with many pros and cons to each. Most people would be fine with any of them.
For example opensuse variants have btrfs with snapshot set up upon installation. That is pretty damn cool and useful!
That said, I am definitely going to try Kalpa because it is a fresh way of doing things.
To anyone still singing the “installation too hard” argument… Archinstall is so cool now… The defaults are just so friggin sane and systemd-boot with UKI as the boot setup is really cool to just be able to choose in an installer. The partitioner is also so easy to use… Most pleasant experience with a Linux installer in recent years. Yes, I’m talking about Arch.
All that said, I love Tumbleweed. They’re also working on providing systemd-boot and it was nice when I tried it. And the one thing that i haven’t seen anybody else implement in a comparable manner is Snapshots. Gotta love it.