OPENSUSE Posts
There's an article on openSUSE news proposing Aeon and Kalpa for EU OS. On the one hand, I love openSUSE Tumbleweed, which Aeon and Kalpa are basically immutable versions of Tumbleweed. On the other hand, I'm not European and I don't really have any say in the subject, but I do have an opinion. SUSE has been pushing for openSUSE to de-brand from it, which Aeon pretty much already has. I'm hoping this is the point where openSUSE sees it also needs to actually de-brand. Fedora is a widely used distro, even in Europe, so I think it's non-branding with Red Hat may give it an advantage here. It's a smoke screen, because I already believe Red Hat still makes the decisions, but at least there's a smoke screen.
Even though Tumbleweed is a technically more advanced distro than Fedora, with snapper, openQA, zypper, yast, rolling updates, and less bureaucracy, Fedora is still just Fedora, and not Red Hat Fedora or openRH Fedora, while Tumbleweed is still openSUSE Tumbleweed. openSUSE needs to complete the re-branding, regardless of this issue, but I'm hoping this pushes it to actually happening. To me, Tumbleweed is the universal distro. You can do anything from one installer and you can do anything you want with it, whether it's repo packages or flatpaks, server or desktop. It's the perfect distro and the kind of distro that could live forever. The only time I've ever had to reinstall Tumbleweed was because my disk died. I can't say that for any other distro or even operating system.
Once again, this is a European choice and I think they are correct to be looking at it the way they are. They should worry about their security and access to reliable and standardized software. Any country should, much less an entire continent. The US is too backward to even think about having a US OS; we just care about paying lobbyists and some parasitic company's bottom line, because they donated to someone's campaign or are buddies with someone elected to office. I have my OS and that's all I can control. I think the EU would do well to pick Tumbleweed as their OS, whether directly or through Aeon and Kalpa.
Tumbleweed now has the latest (mainline) Linux Kernel, 6.13. I'm running it right now, no issues so far :)
I never use Discover, unless it's to install something KDE specific and I never use it to update. If you are using openSUSE Tumbleweed and want to get rid of Discover Notifier, run this:
sudo zypper rm --clean-deps discover6-notifier
sudo zypper al discover6-notifier
These will uninstall the notifier and lock the package so it isn't installed in the future, which it typically is by default.
Sometime around snapshot 20250102 I started having issues with Flatpaks not using system fonts or cursors. Most notably in DBeaver and Zen Browser. If you have these issues, you can solve them as below.
Download the previous RPM from the Tumbleweed repos: https://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss/x86_64/xdg-desktop-portal-1.18.4-1.1.x86_64.rpm
Open the location you downloaded the RPM in a terminal and run:
sudo zypper in --oldpackage xdg-desktop-portal-1.18.4-1.1.x86_64.rpm(optional) Lock the package version to skip the bad version:
sudo zypper al xdg-desktop-portal
Note: once a newer package is released, you can remove the package lock with sudo zypper rl xdg-desktop-portal
Better late than never, Tumbleweed finally got the 6.12 Kernel with version 6.12.6.
As far as I can tell, there were some issues with the new kernel and systemd-boot (which I don't use). The automated testing kept failing, so the kernel had been held back until now.
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.
Interesting discussion to watch at openSUSE Conference 2024.
Brief: SUSE has presented openSUSE with an opportunity to rebrand away from a direct connection to SUSE. This is in an attempt to preserve SUSE's branding and protect it from ambiguity. The discussion is presented by a representative from SUSE and a representative from openSUSE.
I personally think openSUSE should take the opportunity and run with it.
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.