GNOME Software will destroy your uptime.
I don’t know why nobody has fixed the memory leaks in GNOME Software or why it thinks every update needs a reboot even if it doesn’t. Maybe it’s just because nobody working at IBM Red Hat actually uses it themselves.
The fact that this usability disaster has gone on so long makes me wonder how far back we need to go to determine a date at which the pullback from desktop Linux actually started there.
If you use the package manager in the terminal and never touch GNOME Software, you still need to remember to kill it every few days, to account for all of the memory leaks they won’t fix.
When KDE in openSUSE Leap 15.5 told me there were updates, I grimaced, and then when it didn’t demand a restart I exhaled calmly.
openSUSE has two ways to install software. KDE’s Discover, which is semi-comparable to GNOME Software except it doesn’t seem to leak memory and throw a tantrum if you don’t restart because of Firefox.
Also, YaST. YaST is better if you have an idea what you’re looking for because it shows a lot of things that Discover doesn’t. (Discover is mostly focused on desktop software with AppStream data.)
openSUSE gives the user the option to use Flatpaks, but I don’t feel like I’m being pressured into doing that against my will.
Many of the packaged that IBM is divesting itself from are libraries that do hardware enablement, which can’t be shipped as Flatpak, which was their excuse for dropping LibreOffice RPMs.
So far I am quite pleased with openSUSE Leap and KDE. ⬆