This is going to be an adventure…

I came home on a Friday night to turn on the PC to find nothing but a black screen and blinking black cursor. Not the first time I have seen this, except that on this occasion I could not get past it. I keep Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the home PC for stability and use 19.04 (or whatever the latest release) on the laptop to have the latest and greatest. The laptop does not have a Nvidia card inside it either so there is rarely any issues regarding stability, unlike the problem I faced then. It did not have time to get into this into any real way so I parked to come back to at the weekend (my weekend being Sunday/Monday).

Sunday, still black screen of nothingness. No combination of key strokes or waiting made it go away. So I did the usual fall back of taking out my trusty live usb and booting into that. Except that the live CD booted into nothingness after choosing installation. So I edited the boot commands, choose what I believe to be every conceivable mix of options to get to my desktop. Nothing.

So I created a Fedora live usb, and guess what, the exact same scenario played out. Google, forums, Ask Ubuntu… everywhere I looked for answers seemed to give me the same combination of usual fixes for this problem. But nothing was doing it for me. It was only when somebody in one of the forums started suggesting that I look into updating the BIOS and other digging around that I realised I was way beyond my comfort zone. After 12 happy years with Ubuntu (with some periods of Fedora) I had hit a wall.

What I did next felt desperate, but I could not think of anything else. I booted into my Windows partition and deleted the Ubuntu partition. Recreated the partition and went to start fresh.

Again, nothing.

That was my weekend blown so over the course of the following work week I downloaded Pop OS, Elementary, Opensuse (tumbleweed and leap) and tried to see if any of them would work. Pop started out well, getting me as far as the partition manager before failing. But it was Opensuse that surprised me, the Leap 15 version of the OS went through the full installation process and came out the other side giving me a fully working desktop!

I initially choose the familiar Gnome environment, but I have since moved to KDE. For whatever reason it just seems to feel better to me on Opensuse, the Kubuntu version never seemed to offer such a stable experience, but come back to that later.

Opensuse is nowhere as easy as Ubuntu or Fedora to get up and running. The installation process is great until you get to the partitioning section which was a bit of a jungle to get through. The rest of the process went fine.

Once I landed in the desktop I could not get on line until I switched to network manger (I had no idea how to configure wlan0 during the install). Then there were more head bashing, like setting up printer, keyboard keys kept changing when I hid the ibus option, figuring out Yast, dropbox not connecting, figuring our firewall settings… it was like coming to linux for the first time all over again.

So I did it all again. Ran the installer from the start to finish, booted into the new desktop (this time KDE). Setup went a lot easier this time. I created all the family user accounts. Installed deja dup and fully restored our files to the new environment.

Now here I am, typing this up in a very enjoyable OS. Part of me would be tempted to say that Opensuse is definitely underrated, truth be told if it was not for an interview of a recent Late Night Linux podcast I probably would have passed by it. But I am glad I did not. That said, the hurdles for a new user are still a little troublesome, though worth getting over. For instance I installed the KDE plasma desktop onto my Ubuntu 19.04 laptop and again its got issue’s with apps crashing and bug reports being sent on alsmot every login. Opensuse KDE is a completely different experience in comparison, so much so I have chosen it over my long time favourite Gnome.

Anyway, this is were I am now. Leap 15.1 comes out soon (May 22 2019) and the upgrade process does not look as straight forward as Fedora or Ubuntu, but if I end up with a better user experience then it’s worth it. I do not have time to waste evening trying to fix my home PC, so as long as I get a good user experience what more can I ask for?

For now, let’s see where this leap out of the dark takes me.