The VLC thing can be solved relatively easily by installing opi with zypper, and then running opi codecs, which will add all the necessary repos and install everything. After that VLC (and h.264 etc) will work like a charm.

I upvoted you, I am a fellow openSUSE fan and contributor.

But I need to point out that if you install VLC from a repository outside of Factory, then it's not auto-tested.

Moreover, Packman is external to the openSUSE project altogether. If you use it, you are supposed to "just trust" that everything will be fine.

You are better off installing VLC through Flatpak.

I'm running Arch for a very long time. I agree this is not a distro for general audience. I disagree, however, that it is not stable. When I'm doing work I don't update my system. I enjoy my stable configuration and when I have time, I do update, I curiously watch which amazing foss software had an update. And I try them. I check my new firefox. I check gimp's new features. etc.. or if I have to do something I easily fix it, like in no time because I know my OS. Then I enjoy my stable system again.

Do you want to know what's unstable? When I had my new AMD GPU that I built my own kernel for, because the driver wasn't in mainline. And it randomly crashed the system. That's unstable.

Or when I installed my 3rd DE in ubuntu and apt couldn't deal with it, it somehow removed X.org. And I couldn't fix it. That's also something I don't want. Arch updates are much better than this.

Literally the last two RSS items right now are about how splitting packages will require intervention for some users (plasma and Linux firmware).

Maybe a nitpick, but the linux-firmware situation is different, it's not about needing to install extra packages (they turned the existing package into a meta package or whatever it's called), but about that coinciding with some changes that can break the upgrade process and require you to force uninstall a package before proceeding.

But yeah, good point about plasma, the only differences I can even think of are that plasma is probably more popular, and definitely more important to have working.

It's more like they expect you to do more reading than I would like to do. If I had been reading more of what they would like, I would have known I was expected to make a decision before updating and install an additional package. So from that view, they didn't push a breaking update.

I hope we're talking about that Linus, and not that Linus. You know, the one that works with computers, and not the other one that works with computers.

Can definitely recommend Fedora too. Software updates are at a good pace, and the system has a lot of polish all around. For example, all you need to do for updates is to press "update" in Discover and it'll do everything for you, applying on reboot for stability. Most things "just work".

The only issue is that you provide free testing for IBM, so it's a no go if you try to boycott/avoid US companies. If you don't it's indeed a great choice.

+1 for Tumbleweed. It's a rolling release distro without (most of) the hassle and YaST is a fantastic utility which you can use to do many things. Nice graphical stuff to help you configure things like backup. Never had any breakages so far with Tumbleweed :)

Thanks! This wasn't a distro I knew much about but it's looking like one I will try out. The way they test packages is exactly the kind of choices around updates I'm looking for.

I like how many options Yast exposes. I enjoyed learning how to do most of what I need in the terminal with Arch but being able to do everything I need through GUI helps when I'm not able to recall a lot in the moment but still need to do a thing.

This is probably the best answer.

Plus, their equivalent of the AUR, the open build system, can actually be used to build packages for any system.

If it is the rolling aspect OP likes about arch. Then absolutely. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is amazing. But I do think something like Gentoo is more arch like in the sense that you got to do most things your self.

What issues did you have? One of the many awesome things about NixOS is that you can write overrides for any particular package if you need an older version, or even to change some options.

I'm curious as to why the package manager doesn't fix this automatically?

I don't want to fault people for avoiding Arch's instability in general but this is a very minor issue.

VLC is not a system critical package. I absolutely understand the mods choice to not put it in the RSS. At most they could put a notice in the pacman logs when it updates.

Thanks for this. My VLC broke similarly, but I use it rarely enough that I hadn't looked into it yet.

I had the same issue, hadn't found the solution yet (also didn't looked too hard) and while I sort of agree that it should have been in the news I also understand why it's not (it only affects people with VLC, and not everyone uses VLC, if every time a package gets split it was in the news the news would be all about that). That being said I think that there were other solutions that would have been much better, namely split the package with a mandatory dependency on vlc-plugins-all and convert that to optional dependency in a month or two, that way everything keeps working as is for people during the transition, but after a short while it can be modularized.