openSUSE

Raised as a usability problem by 26 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 22 threads.

People raised many different problems with openSUSE, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 27 complaints

Immutable desktop required too much work to use day to day2026-03-27
Right-click menus throw errors and control panels don't work out of the box2026-01-01
Packman codecs conflict with official repos, so GUI updaters fail and new users struggle2025-11-08
Couldn't figure out which overlapping Xorg and Wayland settings make ctrl:nocaps work2025-03-31
Distro has been unpredictable and bug laden, with unclear direction, making it harder to use than Debian2025-02-14
Three documented Nvidia driver install methods, none of which worked for the user2024-10-31
Documentation for immutable openSUSE distros is severely lacking for daily-driver users2024-06-29
Packages missing from official repos must be hunted down elsewhere, with insufficient options2024-06-29
Driver install requires many manual steps, blacklisting, and MOK enrollment that fails with non-QWERTY keyboards2024-06-28
Unclear how to learn and maintain the snapshot system workflow2023-10-30
Installer makes users manually type WiFi network name and encryption instead of listing access points2023-08-17
Updates pile up and often cause conflicts that can't be resolved2023-08-09
Disk encryption password must be typed twice and keyboard layout can't be set properly during install2023-07-17
GPU memory clock sticks at lowest power state, making system unusable until display refresh rate changed2023-03-26
Everything displays tiny and unreadable, and scaling on X11 never worked2023-01-16
Video and music don't play in browser until user manually adds codec repos via shell2021-06-02
Btrfs snapshots silently filled the whole disk, causing confusing disk-full errors2020-12-23
Confusing libav package names and needing a third-party repo to play video2020-09-01
Squishy indirect controls make the ball hard to steer, causing frustration2017-06-24
Controls felt artificially hard to operate, so the player rage quit2017-06-24
Scrolling upward isn't intuitive, and the video takes too long to reach2017-06-23
Page scrolls the wrong way and static screenshots leave the character unclear2017-06-23
Weekly automatic btrfs balance makes the system virtually unusable for about 15 minutes2017-05-30
Scary warning when running desktop shortcut is unintuitive; users don't understand 'Mark Executable'2017-02-05
Many things broke, so two days of installing failed on a normal machine2016-03-30
Version 11.3 was awful to use, so the user reverted to 10.12010-09-17
Installer overwhelms with too many choices, checkboxes and dialogues2010-05-25