David Dyess .com

Mid-summer in 2020, I started planning and buying parts for a new PC build. During all of that, I was also looking for a new Linux distro. At the time, I was tired of LTS and always having to manage a big chunk of my own package versions. I tried Fedora, but then an upgrade broke my desktop and I could have probably fixed it, but I decided I didn't want to deal with major distro upgrades at all. I tried Arch, then I tried Tumbleweed. I said, "Okay...I'm gonna give this [Tumbleweed] a try, I'll run it until it breaks." Well, 4 years later now, It never broke. Not only that, I went nearly 2 years without having to use snapper to roll back an update, at one point, and today, it has been 11 months and 15 days since my last roll back. That is insane reliability for a rolling distro. That's also without me having to manually fix anything, which you just don't do when you can just roll back.

Tumbleweed is the best Linux distro. It is.

I play Splitgate, which is an arena FPS with a really cool portal mechanic. Well they've been working on a new game for almost 2 years, I think, it's been a while. They stopped development on Splitgate to make the new game. Their website currently has a countdown timer and a July 18th date... Splitgaters are getting excited, but we don't know exactly what the countdown is to. Some think it's just a new teaser video. Others think it's a release. The intensity is building.

What is interesting, and potentially an indicator, is they refreshed their Discord server, so most of the old channels are gone, it has a new logo, and there are 3 new Server Status channels for Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation that are currently locked. The current Splitgate game is still online, so it's odd they would take down everything for the current game, unless the new one is actually coming soon.

Timer is down to 4 hours and 36 minutes, so I'll guess we'll know in the morning...

A vulnerability in openSSH has been patched. You can read about it here. If you are running Linux, there's good chance this applies to you (unless you are running a distro with openSSH older than 2020) and you should update. As far as I know, most major distros had the update available before the announcement was made.

KDE Plasma 6.1 was released on 18 June 2024 and it has been updated in openSUSE Tumbleweed with snapshot 20240622. It seems to be running very smoothly for me. This release comes with several new features and improved Wayland support with the addition of Explicit Sync. Read more on KDE Plasma 6.1's official release announcement.

Also, there is the Reef wallpaper made for 6.1, but not included with the release, you can get it here.

In order to enable codecs with openSUSE Tumbleweed, we need to use a 3rd party repository for potentially patent encumbered packages. The primary option for VLC with codecs is often Packman, these instructions are for installing VLC using the official VLC repository instead.

Open YaST2 Software Repositories

Click Add

Choose, HTTP, click Next

Choose Edit Parts of the URL

Repository Name: VLC

Server Name: download.videolan.org

Directory on Server: /SuSE/Tumbleweed

Go to this URL to verify the GPG Key: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-suse.html

Click Trust

You'll return to the YaST2 Software Repositories screen. For me, it named the repository Tumbleweed. If you want to rename it, select the repository and click Edit. I preferred VLC for the name.

With the repository still highlighted, use the Priority input and change it to 89 or a lesser value than other repositories. This will put it at a higher priority.

Once you are finished, click OK

I then just performed sudo zypper ref && sudo zypper dup. I also had some conflicts already, so if it doesn't pick up the VLC repository for those file, you can probably run sudo zypper dup --allow-vendor-change.

Note: If you aren't using Tumbleweed, the videolan.org link above provides information for other versions. I used it on Tumbleweed, so I can't vouch for it on other versions.

I use openSUSE on most of my servers, with the exception being my game servers - LinuxGSM doesn't support openSUSE, my desktop, and my laptop. I've built up some scripts and stuff to make things easier to use, so I'll probably make some generic versions to release here. I also want to do a page that lets you track openSUSE Tumbleweed updates and links to current news. I'd need to automate it, so it may take a bit to build it. Once I have that I want to do a page that helps you track Packman updates. Finally, I wrote some docs for a new documentation project we were doing for openSUSE, but it didn't really materialize. I'll probably put some of the pages up here instead. I think I probably have a few local docs I've put together for reminders too. But yeah, I want to put some openSUSE content on here and maybe help people find info easier.

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.

I used to try Wayland every once in a while and I'd always run into something that was a show stopper. Then, around October of last year, something changed and it became usable for me, so I used it into November. Then, my SSD began failing, I had bought a new SSD, re-installed openSUSE Tumbleweed, and couldn't remember how I had fixed KWallet to work with everything on Wayland. I've still tried it, off and on, and it worked for most things, just not those pesky passwords. Fast-forward to this morning and I dedicated some search time to finding the fix again. I blogged about the fix earlier, it's in the How-to category.

So I've been using Wayland again and it's really really good. I'm gonna play some games later. I'm hoping I can just use it all the time. I normally go from dev work to gaming and I don't like having to log out, re-log into X/Wayland, and vice-versa. I'm just gonna use one or the other, but I prefer Wayland if possible. Anyway, giving it a try again. I'm sure I'll blog an update some time :)

Back in November my SSD began failing and I had to re-install openSUSE Tumbleweed on a new drive. The downside to not having to fix my computer often is I don't have to do it often enough to remember how I did it. One of the things I hadn't fixed yet was being able to use KWallet with programs like Git GUI using on Wayland. It's actually the only reason, I know of, that I couldn't use Wayland. Well, I finally did some searching and found the fix:

• Open the .config/plasma-workspace/env folder in your Home folder

• Create a file, named something like startup.sh

• Insert this into that file:

#!/bin/sh 
SSH_ASKPASS=/usr/libexec/ssh/ksshaskpass 
export SSH_ASKPASS 
[ -n "$SSH_AGENT_PID" ] || eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"

• Save and close

• Open the .config/plasma-workspace/shutdown folder in your Home folder

• Create a file, named something like shutdown.sh

• Insert this into that file:

[ -z "$SSH_AGENT_PID" ] || eval "$(ssh-agent -k)"

• Save and close

• Logout

• Log in with Wayland

I hope this helps someone else. :)

I try to watch most of the Linux Experiment videos and this one stood out, because it's saying what I've been saying for quite a while. Now, I know there is missing data in his results, but the point wasn't the best optimized distro for gaming. The video is all about usability and what the user actually sees. You don't have to install a gaming distro to play games. Some of the worst distros I've tried were gaming distros, so just use what you want to use and game on that.