Tumbleweed is rock solid. I took out an old Intel based Macbook that has not been updated in two years (I stopped traveling for work and no longer needed a laptop so the software got outdated). OpenSuse Tumbleweed updated flawlessly. It switched to the newest gcc, switched over to pipewire, etc. without a single issue. I did not read the latest news as I used to do on Arch.
Also, OpenSuse is a family of distros. Choose what works for you. Tumbleweed is the main product and the base of all Suse offerings (and I recommend it).
- Tumbleweed rolls similarly to Arch but has more QA testing
- Slowroll is just snapshots of Tumbleweed that are updated less frequently. May replace Leap.
- Leap does traditional releases similar to other OSes such as Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu
- MicroOS (and its flavors) update the same way Android does; as a full image. You could pick a MicroOS flavor such as Aeon (Gnome) or Kalpa (KDE) and stick to Flatpaks which as a strategy works great on the Steamdeck but I have yet to try it on desktop.
As someone who has tried several Linux distributions what was important to me was how stable updates were. On that old Macbook, that I used for ten years; I mostly used Chakra, Arch, and Tumbleweed. That Tumbleweed install was at least six years old.
I did have one issue, but it was a kernel introduced bug. Long since fixed. Someone messed up Apple EFI boot; so I had to load the EFI menu when booting and then select my internal SSD to start the OS.
There is a pro side to everything. The 695 will have longer support in the aftermarket/ROM community since it essentially got a rebranding into a “new” product. That $300 Oneplus N30 is looking good right now.