openSUSE Leap 15

fox · July 28, 2018, 11:47:59 AM

Although I can't use it on my office iMac because of the dated kernel (4.12), openSUSE Leap 15 works well on my 2011 iMac. It got good reviews and is, at least at present, pretty up to date (minus the older kernel). I downloaded the live version and put it on a USB stick with Etcher. To my surprise, it's reasonably fast and any changes you make to settings or apps that you add are preserved on the live usb. Although I am a Gnome user, I chose the KDE version just to learn more about it. I keep trying to like KDE Plasma, but find minor annoyances that I can't (or don't know how to) fix. I need a calendar application and the KDE-native korganizer doesn't cut it. Gnome Calendar installs, but I can't get it to display my Google calendars despite Google being added to my online applications. (Korganizer displays my Google calendars, but I find it unattractive.) The biggest KDE annoyance for me continues to be Kwallet, which has to be installed to get certain apps to work. Every time I boot up, I get a Kwallet window asking me for a password.

Jason · July 29, 2018, 03:07:15 AM

As for Kwallet nags, this might help. This is what I did in Kubuntu 18.04 to stop it from doing that.

As for your Gnome calendar, I can't help, sorry. When I need to access my Google Calendar on my PC or laptop, I just go to the website.

fox · July 29, 2018, 06:52:28 AM

Thanks, Jason. That worked after I disabled Kwallet, but only after I altered the settings in Network Manager to store my password unencrypted for all users. Before that, booting would require a password to activate my network, so no better than putting in a password to network manager. And in either case, I start off with an error message that the update manager cannot get a connection; undoubtedly because it's looking for it before the wifi is activated. Not a big deal, but very clunky compared with Gnome. In this case though, it might be an openSUSE issue rather than a KDE issue.

As for calendars, I now have to connect to Google calendars through the website as well on Ubuntu and Mint as well as openSUSE with one exception - I can do it directly on Ubuntu 18.04 through Nuvola apps. Normally this is a paid service ($US 5/month or thereabouts?), but it is free in a restricted version. I'm not sure that there is an openSUSE version of this. Where I don't have Nuvola installed, Gnome calendars works OK, as it picks up Google calendar events. But this is when running Gnome. I don't know why it isn't working on openSUSE Leap; I'll play with it later. At any rate, Korganizer works; it just isn't as visually attractive as the other two.

fox · July 29, 2018, 07:09:02 AM

I liked openSUSE Leap enough to install it on my 2011 iMac. I did my own formatting and didn't add a bootloader. (The bootloader I had picked it up.) The one negative aspect was that the installation didn't retain any of the settings and customizations I did on the live distro; I had to do these things all over. Also, I had some messing around to do to get my wifi recognized, but that might have been specific to my Broadcom wifi card.

fox · July 29, 2018, 04:03:25 PM

I have played with it for several hours and am once again reminded about why Debian/Ubuntu-based distros are so good. All of the software I ever need for it is either in their repositories or they make a distro and version-specific version of it that just works. I have a few oddities that often cause problems when you go outside of Debian/Ubuntu: a reference manager (Mendeley), a note app (Simplenote), a statistical app (RStudio) and a Google Drive sychronizer (Insync) to name the main ones. Trying to find and install them, at one point I buggered up KDE to the point that it wasn't functional. Ironically I had somehow installed the Cinnamon desktop when installing something else, and I was able to boot into it and work with it. I tried various things to fix KDE, including reinstalling it, but nothing worked. Since the point of installing openSUSE was to try it with KDE, I nuked my installation and started over. I don't know what I did to screw things up, but two hours later everything is working fine. The only app that wasn't working was RStudio, but a daily build solved that problem, too.

Jason · July 29, 2018, 09:22:10 PM

Using Timeshift would probably have been very handy there assuming it installs fairly easily.

I tried an earlier version of OpenSUSE on my laptop and one of the problems I had was that Spotify only has a .deb version and a Snap version. The Snap version, I could not get to work in OpenSUSE. I think there was another program but I honestly don't recall right now. I made notes but forgot to transfer them when I blew the distro away.

fox · July 30, 2018, 07:15:13 AM

I thought that Timeshift was a Mint program but that is not the case. I looked for Timeshift in the Ubuntu 18.04 repositories and didn't find it, but it is available from a ppa. According to this github page, Timeshift can be installed on Fedora and Arch-based distros as well, but SUSE wasn't listed and I don't think it supports dnf or yum. I could take a snapshot of the openSUSE image from Ubuntu and use it to restore a broken openSUSE distro. However, if openSUSE Leap 15 breaks again, I won't be interested in reinstalling it.

Jason · July 30, 2018, 08:33:32 AM

I would just try the timeshift*amd64.run file. It should automatically install the rpm file for you. OpenSUSE uses rpm files as its base. It's just that it uses zypper as the CLI package manager, however it's not the only one it comes with.

Source: https://en.opensuse.org/Package_management

However, since the file won't come from a repository which means it won't know when there is a new version, so it'll be your job to keep it updated periodically by looking for a new one. That's my guess, however it may be intelligent enough to realize you're using OpenSUSE and update the repo list for you automatically. This happens if you download the Google Chrome browser in RPM or DEB format.

If it breaks and you have Timeshift, you won't be reinstalling it, you will just being doing a restore and the only packages that will be replaced will be those that changed so it will take much much less time than a full install.

BusterE · July 30, 2018, 05:52:13 PM

Since my Timeshift actually uses Rsync snapshots, and apparently Suse supports this type of snapshot, is there no way to take advantage of this without trying to get Timeshift software involved?

Do their forums say anything? Hard to believe Suse wouldn't have some way of handling this easily. Yast has nothing?

Jason · July 31, 2018, 01:32:25 AM

Quote from: BusterE on July 30, 2018, 05:52:13 PM
Do their forums say anything? Hard to believe Suse wouldn't have some way of handling this easily. Yast has nothing?

I don't think that there is. This section from the official docs for upgrading to version 15 talks about backing up certain system files by hand while making no mention of a better way of doing it. SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) probably has this but you'll have to pay for it.

However, Timeshift should run in OpenSUSE without a problem.