Originally I was looking at Arch based distros such as Manjaro and EndeavourOS, during which I found out Manjaro is somewhat pointless because you pretty much should not use the AUR on Manjaro or else you will break the system inevitably. EndeavourOS looked solid though.

I personally wouldn’t recommend Manjaro, they’ve some questionable decisions and even failed to do some basic things, like failing to renew their SSL certificate, which happened at least twice.

However, I got a few suggestions regarding openSuSE Tumbleweed as a better alternative to Arch based distros and just wanted to know what are the pros and cons of OpenSuSE compared to Arch based distros from your experience?

Well, the two aren’t all that different. openSUSE has an better installer, which offers even full disk encryption, automated partitioning for disks in BTRFS with backups enabled. One big plus I can see in openSUSE’s favour is YaST, the graphical utility for system configuration, and allows you to configure nearly everything in a GUI.

Arch, memes aside, is relatively stable in my experience, only having problems once or twice with Nvidia drivers. I think that Arch’s biggest advantage is the AUR. Also one big plus of it’s install method is that if you read the documentation during the install process, and try to understand it, you’ll get a much clearer picture of how a linux system works in the “backend”.

Both distros are rolling, and the speed that packages arrive in zypper (openSUSE’s package manager) vs pacman (Arch’s) is rather small in my opinion. Personally, I lean more towards openSUSE, but both are good.

In November 2020, Marak had warned that he will no longer be supporting the big corporations with his “free work” and that commercial entities should consider either forking the projects or compensating the dev with a yearly “six figure” salary.

Honestly, I do think he has a point here. These are corporations that use FOSS to make millions off of it, but contribute nothing back, either in code or in monetary support. While I don’t condone his means to try to get that (i.e.intentionally breaking compatibility), he is morally justified in this request.

Your best bet might be probably NTFS, just install ntfs-3g and use that as the file system type when mounting, it should work fine.

Though it will be slower than in windows.