openSUSE's "Agama" Next-Gen Linux Installer Plans For A Busy 2024

[alexvoda]

It's poorly laid out with little logic or reason put into its design.

I don;t know what it is but there seems to be this mentality within the *nix world that unless something is as convoluted and tedious to use as possible then it's not "pro" grade.

I am of the school of thought that software should be designed so that its use is self-explanatory, and average person, with minimum computer experience and average intelligence should be able to sit in front of the computer and figure out what to do without having to RTFM or needing to take an IT class that teaches him how to use it.

I am going to hold you up to what you said an not let you get away easily.

What exactly is poorly laid out. Which screen? Which button?

What exactly is illogical?

Which part of installing OpenSuse in particular do you feel is not self explanatory?

Be specific!

Frothy claims like the ones you made are meaningless and unhelpful.

Since I am to lazy to boot up the installer and take screenshots for some internet argument here is a link to a guide: https://www.tecmint.com/install-opensuse-tumbleweed/

Which of those screens is unsatisfactory and in what way? Can you draw what you would move around, remove, change or add?

[andyprough]

Good, the Suse installer is one of the biggest draw backs to Suse, it feels so outdated and archaic, especially compared to Calamares and Ubiquity.

In fact, i could swear it's the same installer Suse was using back in the 90's.

I started using SuSE in about 1998, and I think it was usingthe YaST installer all the way back then. If not, it was certainly using it by the very early 00's. So you are right, there is probably some similarity going back over 20 years.

One of the things I always appreciated about the YaST installer was you could get very fine-grained in terms of what software you wanted to install. These newer installers typically don't give you any options with respect to software whatsoever, it's a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.

I recall being confused when Ubuntu started shipping all of its daughter distros - Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, etc. With SuSE those desktops were just install-time options. There was never any need to have a separate "distro" or respin. Debian and Slackware also had the different desktops available as options on the installation media if I recall correctly.

[andyprough]

Since I am to lazy to boot up the installer and take screenshots for some internet argument here is a link to a guide: https://www.tecmint.com/install-opensuse-tumbleweed/

See, right on this screen you can click on the word "Software" and select just about anything you like. It's pretty cool actually:

OpenSUSE-Installation-Settings.png

[Jarmer]

I can't for the life of me even remember what the opensuse installer looked / felt like when I used it. Which I think is a very good thing. It did its very specific job, did it just fine, and then was done, and let me get on with what I want to do: use the OS. I'm all for an updated more modern installer, but I don't think the old one was bad either.

[Leinad]

Good, the Suse installer is one of the biggest draw backs to Suse, it feels so outdated and archaic, especially compared to Calamares and Ubiquity.

In fact, i could swear it's the same installer Suse was using back in the 90's.

For me current biggest issue with moving from Leap to Kubuntu is how Kubuntu's installer is bad compared to openSUSE ones, mainly in regard of partitioner part.

[varikonniemi]

It looks nice, but many niche features mentioned in this thread will probably be scrapped. Such is development in the mobile age.

[user1]

For me current biggest issue with moving from Leap to Kubuntu is how Kubuntu's installer is bad compared to openSUSE ones, mainly in regard of partitioner part.

I heard Kubuntu will switch to Calamares in 24.04. It currently still uses ubiquity in 23.10.

[woddy]

The problem is that the more possibilities you offer to customize the installation, the less user friendly it is.
I must say that I, who had always used the Ubuntu installation, had no problem with the openSUSE one, I found it excellent, graphically improvable, but it is one of the best I've seen.
Some advanced settings are hidden, just to avoid confusing the user. After that everything can be improved.

[sophisticles]

I am going to hold you up to what you said an not let you get away easily.

What exactly is poorly laid out. Which screen? Which button?

What exactly is illogical?

Which part of installing OpenSuse in particular do you feel is not self explanatory?

Be specific!

Frothy claims like the ones you made are meaningless and unhelpful.

Since I am to lazy to boot up the installer and take screenshots for some internet argument here is a link to a guide: https://www.tecmint.com/install-opensuse-tumbleweed/

Which of those screens is unsatisfactory and in what way? Can you draw what you would move around, remove, change or add?

I'm happy to play your little game.

From your link, starting with the first thing I consider archaic:

Choose openSUSE Tumbleweed Installation

Issue, there is no option to boot to a live environment. It's 2024 and while the base Fedora, Debian, Windows, Mac OS, BSD and others also do not allow for booting to a lice environment, once you have used one of the Fedora spins, Ubuntu, GeckoLinux, which is based on OpenSuse, you realize how lame it is to not be able to boot to a live environment.

openSUSE Online Repositories

Completely unnecessary, the install media should have a base system that is installed, there is no need for any additional repositories during the install process.

Choose openSUSE Repositories

A continuation of the nonsense and this is something that annoys me about every distro, even after installation is complete.

There's Main, Main OSS, Main non-OSS, Main Sources, Main DEBUG, seriously WTF? This is something that needs to be decided at install?

Choose openSUSE System Roles

This just makes me want to slap someone. you have Desktop with KDE, Desktop with Gnome, Desktop with XFCE, Generic Desktop, Server, Transactional Server and something else.

There should be 2 options tops, Generic Desktop and Server and that's it.

I would take it even further and say that there should be separate installers for desktop and server, like nearly every other distro does it.

openSUSE Partitioning

I hate this practitioners and it goes for Fedora's as well. The suggested partitioning is always based on God knows what but on the bright side it does give you a hint as to set up the boot partition, so I guess there is that.

openSUSE Filesystem Options

I'm not a big fan of using different file systems for different partitions.

The have cleaned up the installer a bit, the partitioning to me is poorly laid out, I would make it dummy proof, have a nice simple screen that shows all the physical disks, with any partitions currently on them and and then clearly say that in order to boot the system a boot partition of this size is required, for the amount of installed ram we recommend this much swap, we recommend separate root and Home directories if this size.

Assume that the person sitting in from of the computer has never installed anything in his life.

KISS.

[Estranged1906]

I love the current openSUSE installer.

You can select exactly which packages you want installed and which ones you don't.

You can add fstab parameters in the partitioner, for example to add btrfs compression (though I believe it should be on by default like in Fedora).

You can change all the relevant security settings. PolicyKit settings default or easy? AppArmor or SELinux? Firewall on or off? Secure Boot yes or no?

I mean, which other installer lets you decide all that?