OPENSUSE Posts
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.