OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 Alpha Released

[Awesomeness]

boot was surprisingly slow

Chances are it's their networking setup. openSUSE uses weirdly long timeout durations, for example. "systemd-analyze blame" is a great way to find out what's holding up the boot process.

[Leinad]

Probably want to also consider network speed? Or is that not relevant with tumbleweed installs?



Besides Snapper + Grub, what else is it doing with BTRFS? I'm aware of some maintenance scripts.

And enabled quotas, installer checks on need more freespace on system disk with btrfs, good default subvolume layout - databases should not be on CoW, /opt should not be rollbacked with system rollback.

[xAlt7x]

There's a lot of good things about openSUSE Leap:
- based on enterprise OS
- Open Build Service is awesome! Super-easy to find something for your distro (unlike with launchpad) and easy to rebuild packages. Also semi-official repos for KDE, XFCE, X11/Mesa backports
- Customizable installer, let's you pick only packages you want and configure your system

Unfortunately there's some pitfalls:
- /tmp is not cleared (not obvious for unexperienced users)
- Printers must be managed with YaST, not DE applets (again, not obvious)
- You need to "forbid" installation of some packages (KDE PIM if I remember correctly) so they won't return with updates
- Some generic actions (like "Cancel printing", mount another partition require password). For example Ubuntu & it's flavours have workarounds for that out of box
- You need unofficial repo for codecs (packman)
All those things there by design.

So while I really like openSUSE, all those liitle things prevent me from recommending it to a broad audience.

[marccollin]

I hadn't looked at the rolling image for a while. I see they offer a 4GB+ tumbleweed image which I didn't expect. How often is that updated though? If it's not often, how much is the size of updates after (or prior to) an install?

take a few second to search...

new iso is created for every update

Some USB media can be quite slow to install from though too, but that's more of an issue with old USB 2.0 sticks with really poor I/O performance (eg 1-2MB/sec).

usb 3 key was available in 2012.... if you have a slow network and slow usb maybe it's time to update or stop to complain

[elatllat]

Likely all my problems with OpenSUSE tumbleweed were related to the desktop install requiring more video memory (instead of failing gracefully, it just got ridiculously slow).

[Charlie68]

I tested OpenSUSE tumbleweed yesterday; the installer and boot was surprisingly slow and missing progress indicators....
(compared to any of the other main distributions I tested)

Which ISO have you tried? Live ISO is not recommended for Tumbleweed, DVD or network image is recommended.
Yes, the installation process is a bit longer than other distributions, however the progress bar is there, so I don't understand what you mean ... but the Tumbleweed installer (openSUSE) is the best in terms of configurability, you have a lot of configurations that you can change to your liking such as you can even choose whether or not you want to disable CPU mitigations.
I don't spend my days installing distributions, so the time it takes for me doesn't really matter, compared to its high configurability.

[polarathene]

usb 3 key was available in 2012.... if you have a slow network and slow usb maybe it's time to update or stop to complain

I have a usb 3 one that peforms poorly too. Not all USB 3 storage are max performance. Not complaining, just pointing out that these are things that can make the install slower. For slow network, a few years ago there was nothing I could do, already had the best speed available in my area (1MB/sec), now I have ~100MB/sec.

[marccollin]

I have a usb 3 one that peforms poorly too. Not all USB 3 storage are max performance. Not complaining, just pointing out that these are things that can make the install slower. For slow network, a few years ago there was nothing I could do, already had the best speed available in my area (1MB/sec), now I have ~100MB/sec.

come on.... you add bullshit on bullshit, stop complaining all the time....... if you have a bad connection, don't do a network install..... if also you had a slow usb key.... it's time to buy a new one...... otherwise just continue to complain

[szymon_g]

> Fedora adopted BTRFS as default recently. No idea if they've got Snapper setup by default too or how the other stuff compares.

> OpenSUSE loses Snapper if you don't go with the default BTRFS setup iirc (as in, you still use BTRFS but change subvols and such). IIRC, setting up Snapper isn't too difficult, the integration with GRUB requires a patch, but some other distros have that. I'm more interested in the less obvious additions related to BTRFS.

it's like that in leap only, on tw snapper works fine.
also, afaik even on ext4 + lvm there is snapper too (I may be wrong on that)

I like the Opensuse because it has yast (which makes configuration a rather simple task), zypper- while isn't perfect- is a rather nifty tool. + one can find most newer apps in OBS, which is nice (if one needs them).

the drawback is that there is a shiteload of small packages, and when the update from kde 5.19 to 5.20 came I got presented with something like 2400 updates. sure- most of them are small ones, but it wouldn't hurt to turn them into fewer but bigger packages. another drawback is that on TW deltas do not work, so you have to download the whole package instead of the differences (like you do on leap).

[Charlie68]

There's a lot of good things about openSUSE Leap:
- based on enterprise OS
- Open Build Service is awesome! Super-easy to find something for your distro (unlike with launchpad) and easy to rebuild packages. Also semi-official repos for KDE, XFCE, X11/Mesa backports
- Customizable installer, let's you pick only packages you want and configure your system

Unfortunately there's some pitfalls:
- /tmp is not cleared (not obvious for unexperienced users)
- Printers must be managed with YaST, not DE applets (again, not obvious)
- You need to "forbid" installation of some packages (KDE PIM if I remember correctly) so they won't return with updates
- Some generic actions (like "Cancel printing", mount another partition require password). For example Ubuntu & it's flavours have workarounds for that out of box
- You need unofficial repo for codecs (packman)
All those things there by design.

So while I really like openSUSE, all those liitle things prevent me from recommending it to a broad audience.

The printer: Yast is the most reliable method in openSUSE, but if you have HP for example, once configured you manage it from its tool and in any case you are not obliged to use Yast.
Cups requires the password, it is not a choice of openSUSE, but of the Cups developer, other distributions choose differently, but if the developer of the program thinks that it should be used as root, perhaps it is because otherwise there is a security problem. OpenSUSE is known to have a strict security policy, is that bad? I don't know, for me not and in any case you can change that behavior too.
KDE pin is part of the default, just like in Kubuntu and other distributions, if you don't want it just don't install it, no need to lock them in Leap, but in Tumbleweed yes.
The packman repository is a semi-official and pre-set community repository but disabled by default for legal reasons only.
Codecs are installed with a command from the terminal.
Obviously if you are used to Ubuntu and derivatives, openSUSE is different, as is Fedora, you need to learn how to manage them, it is not yet another Debian based, however for many things it is easier.