First of all, this is just a rant. I do not, sincerely, intend on changing my distro any time soon. I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed for about 4 years (my first test install was around June 2020, I didn't switch to using it all the time until around August). In that time, it has been the absolute best experience I've had with any Linux distro, across the board. There have been a few hiccups though.

The main hiccup wasn't really openSUSE's fault, per se, but it still kinda falls on openSUSE. It's also the one I'm still having to deal with, to this day, and partly the entire purpose behind this rant. openSUSE is "sponsored" by SUSE, which is a very large corporation with a lot at stake. I have immense respect for SUSE, they are big players in a big game. So, backstory. There is this entirely open source graphics library named VA-API. This library is necessary to have a functional AMD GPU and AMD's drivers depend on VA-API support through the Mesa drivers. Other GPUs get their VA-API support from their own libraries and drivers, but AMD's requires VA-API support directly from Mesa.

Last year-ish, the Mesa project decided to disable compiling VA-API support in Mesa by default. This means that someone packaging Mesa has to manually enable compiling VA-API support. This also means someone enabling VA-API support could be held liable, according to some corporate lawyers, for infringing upon some software patents that are related to VA-API functionality. SUSE, therefore, does not package Mesa with VA-API support, which is required by my AMD GPU.

What this all means is I can no longer use openSUSE's Mesa package; it causes my computer to run like crap and I get next to no performance in games. There are other packages that have the same issues, which basically boils down to some lawyer said no, so there is the Packman repository that packages them with potentially problematic features enabled. One of those packages is VLC, which includes codecs for playing videos, which openSUSE's package does not include - yeah, really useful to have a video player that doesn't play videos.

Well lately I haven't been able to update openSUSE Tumbleweed, because Packman's packages continue falling behind openSUSE's, which then leads to conflicts in the package manager. I can sometimes ignore the package update and choose an option of "keep obsolete". That works when it's packages within the same chain, but the current issue actually ties to a KDE dependency, which is outside of that chain. That's rather inconvenient, considering Tumbleweed is a rolling release distro, which is currently not rolling for me. That means I'm not getting the latest security updates, one of which is actually in the newest VLC package. It's very annoying. Meanwhile, some people at openSUSE just recommend using their Mesa and VLC, along with flatpaks for the drivers and codecs. I could do that, except my computer just runs like crap with their Mesa.

I have this deep suspicion that someone behind the scenes at Mesa removed VA-API support to either harm AMD or for some kind of Khronos Group, whose members own nearly all of the patents, plan to attack companies who publish Mesa with VA-API support. I have no proof of that, zero, it just feels like that was what happened. Mesa has a lot of ties to Khronos Group, so it likely was not itself at risk by continuing VA-API support, it doesn't make sense to me that they would disable it.

So that's my issue. I have to rely on a 3rd party to compile some of my packages, because openSUSE wont compile them with needed support, because SUSE wont allow them to. If you are using Fedora, then you have the same issue leading to 3rd party packages, except Packman isn't your 3rd party and you probably don't have that part of the issue. Most other distros ship Mesa with everything you need enabled, but Red Hate and SUSE get in the way in this case.

What am I going to do? Well...nothing, yet. I could use Debian with Distrobox. I'd get a stable base, with Mesa, and I could run newer packages in a Tumbleweed distrobox. I could use Arch. I've used it before and never really had any issues. I could use Gentoo, then I'd just compile everything myself. I could use OBS and just have my own repository for my needed packages. Or, I could just wait, some more, and eventually this will be resolved...until the next time. It's annoying, I don't want to install a different distro, but I don't want to deal with these issues. Software patents need to die.