When comparing Hardened Gentoo vs openSUSE Tumbleweed, the Slant community recommends Hardened Gentoo for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for misanthropes?” Hardened Gentoo is ranked 36th while openSUSE Tumbleweed is ranked 42nd. The most important reason people chose Hardened Gentoo is:
Your only real options for a widely supported hardened distro are the Red Had distros (Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora) of which Fedora is your best bet for a desktop , or Gentoo. You can make a hardened kernel in Gentoo while stripping unnecessary features, creating a much smaller attack surface, and using in-kernel mitigations others don’t.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Supports custom hardened kernels
Your only real options for a widely supported hardened distro are the Red Had distros (Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora) of which Fedora is your best bet for a desktop , or Gentoo. You can make a hardened kernel in Gentoo while stripping unnecessary features, creating a much smaller attack surface, and using in-kernel mitigations others don’t.
Pro Comprehensive hardened guide in wiki
From SELinux to PaX to AppArmor to.... The wiki has got you covered.
Pro Fully customized kernel that prevents server-side malwares with SSO mechanisms
Out of CentOS /RedHat/Fedora a hardened kernel is very easy to make.
Pro Best defense against NOP-sled malwares, even with ROP/COP mechanisms
Out of CentOS/RedHat/Fedora/OpenSUSE/Slackware/FreeBSD/Mandriva and Arch, only Gentoo can best protect you against NOP-sled malwares, even with ROP/COP mechanisms.
Pro Stable
Tumbleweed is stable enough to use every day. Updates are OpenQA tested to ensure stability before being released for Tumbleweed. Bleeding edge untested software can be tried using OpenSUSE factory.
Pro Easy installation and cutting edge apps
Pro A large amount of software
Pro Tumbleweed + OpenSUSE Build Service
Pro Good selection of preinstalled applications
Pro User friendly + Good support
Active and friendly user community, updates come fast
Cons
Con Little / no third-party support
Like it or not, most third parties don't want to deal with less-popular distros. So most of them only support Ubuntu LTS and those versions of RHEL/CentOS that are still supported.
Con Complex multimedia codecs and plugins installation
Con "Online Update" update in YaST control center only works in openSUSE Leap
Con Packman repository has to be added to have good software support
Con Slow and painful unfortunately, especially compared to other modern distros
