OpenSUSE 13.2 Will Be Released In November

[brosis]

@Cyber Killer
First of all, thanks for response! Really appreciate it!
I installed OpenSUSE because I looked for a solid set and forget solution on a laptop. That does not get between you and the task.

Switching to Tumbleweed actually was not a problem at all. Nothing broke at all and problems that I got were connected with severe inabilities of package manager as well as bad documentation/bad support from community. I have an experience with portage, pacman, yum. That said I didn't look at zypper through the apt' shadow, but as a standalone binary-package-management interface. I learned quite a bit about it, in 6 months, before the fallout started.

I wasn't actually looking at switching package versions from another repo.

Thing was - several critical software elements (including yast) were broken and went totally unnoticed by zypper. The reason why it happened, was because I manually cleaned the bloat off the installation, and used just yast package kit GUI.
You know this quite obvious standard approach:
1) You fire up the default package interface, like Synaptic, Packagekit, whatever.
2) You find a package you dont want at all
3) You tag remove and the system says either it depends upon something you really want, or really don't care either; or you see it right away
4) Then the system removes the package, or not - depending on your choice. No magic was here.

So the chain reaction triggered when I just discovered gparted was not starting, as well as yast GUI itself. Nothing past the gksu dialog.
And these cases, including (elements of) broken output were also not documented anywhere on internet, and zypper verify itself reported all is fine. I can read man pages patiently as well as read official documentation. Speaking of which Arch documentation is vastly, vastly superior being accurate, short and on point.

Upon my wish to reinstall the broken package as is, with all packages that it is depending upon,- logically to just cover the hole where it may be-, I found no method to achieve that. So my switch back from Tumbleweed to 13.1 was an effort to drive all package versions back in a hope to recover the system without reinstallation from scratch.

Oddly enough, the usual replacement of repositories with older one did not trigger any substanial changes, apart from breaking things even worse. On apt, portage, pacman and so on there is a distinction between "manual installed" and "pulled as dependency" as well as version pinning. There is no such mechanism with OpenSuse. Packages stayed broken - from kernel up to X.

The "from" keyword was solely discovered by me in an effort to finally get a working system and stop wasting my time. It worked, but only partially. The rest of the problems like very bad version management stayed. The yast cli tool is of equal ugliness to aptitude, impossible to work with intuitively.

You are correct regarding MATE, because the "System-Add/Remove software" .desktop file, triggered to packagekit start bash script does not have detection of MATE at all. Meaning that under MATE, it results in a fallback approach to ask for password, by invoking an xterm window with xdg-su promt. Shouldn't we actually be trying to detect weither specific TOOLKIT is present in the system and invoke the promt based on toolkit and not DE?...

I know that almost everything is overriden from /etc/config. Setting the display manager was not the problem. The problem was that zypper did not detect installation of MATE and deinstallation of GNOME3 and used basic XDM instead. Who uses XDM with SLIM and LightDM available?

"The whole distro is quite tightly integrated & isn't very friendly to tinkering with the lower level stuff unless you know what you are doing."
Yes, its a toy, that breaks quite amazingly into even smaller pieces with every effort to fix it. This is my view on what happened.

"I wouldn't call the main packages "ancient", they are a bit older than the newest versions, but they are quite fresh."
Kernel 3.7, Libre Office 4.1, Mate from mid 2013. This is not "fresh".

"just because you are not satisfied, you are not entitled to call the whole distro "crap""
I disagree. I would rephrase it this way: just because I call this distro crap, does not mean its crap for everyone. This is certainly true and I have no intention other than encourage those interested to fix it and to give information of what I encountered to others that have no intention of fixing, just now.

"BTW: I don't hang around the Opensuse irc channel, maybe I should? :-)"
I don't know. Thanks for response, but I am currently forced by life situation into fixing my own stuff. Otherwise, I would have working Suse installation, but be homeless...
Thanks.

[Cyber Killer]

@brosis: your problem was switching to Tumbleweed without having experience with the package manager & trying to do stuff like in Debian. It's a different distro, you can't just use it based on experience from something different, you need to learn a bit about it first. Usually Debian folk have issues with zypper that it's weird/bad cause they expect everything to work like apt :-P. As for switching package versions to use ones from another repository - the manpage is your friend:

--from <alias|name|#|URI>
              Select  packages  from  specified  repository.  If  strings specified as arguments to the install command match packages in repositories specified in this option, they will be marked for installation. This
              option currently implies --name, but allows using wildcards for specifying packages.

Next thing - the display manager has to be set from yast in /etc/sysconfig editor (do it from yast not, from a text editor, cause it will get overwritten after any laster changes from yast) in Desktop/Display Manager/DISPLAYMANAGER.

You should really stick to the main installed stuff for a while though (at least until you feel comfortable with the distro - it took me 3 months when I switched from Debian-likes to Opensuse) - Mate is not in the main repository & might be not tested as good as the main packages. The whole distro is quite tightly integrated & isn't very friendly to tinkering with the lower level stuff unless you know what you are doing.

I wouldn't call the main packages "ancient", they are a bit older than the newest versions, but they are quite fresh. Opensuse values the stability of the packages they provide, so there's no rush for the bleeding edge. You came expecting something different - fine, but just because you are not satisfied, you are not entitled to call the whole distro "crap".

BTW: I don't hang around the Opensuse irc channel, maybe I should? :-).

[brosis]

After 6 month experience, OpenSuse is by far the crappiest distro I EVER used.
1. Installed it on notebook, installation okay, LUKS encryption was fine.
2. It already came extremely bloated, I used Gnome3 version, but it does not really matter.
3. Packages of 13.1 are ancient already, so picked Tumbleweed and migrated following official guide. Went okay.
4. Added MATE repo and tried to use MATE. After small fiddling it went okay. Had to install codecs and VLC, own versions are simply unusable.

5. Yesterday decided to clean the bloat a bit. After 6 hours spent, finally was able to remove duplicate or unneeded KDE and Gnome3 stuff (I don't need Okular or Evince, if I am okay with Mate PDF viewer and so on). Had to install lightdm, system did not notice that gdm was removed and offered just XDM..... Tuning lightdm to actually work just took 20 minutes and was acceptable.

6. Today this:
- needed to start gparted to check external volumes. Does not fire up. Output from terminal:

 /usr/sbin/gpartedbin: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib64/libglibmm-2.4.so.1: undefined symbol: g_variant_parse_error_quark

- tried to start package manager yast (or in fact, anything yast non cli). Does not work. Output:

libgtk-3.so.0: undefined symbol: g_application_add_option_group

Googled every single possible case, reinstalled libgtkmm, libgdkmm and so on.
Funny enough, asking zypper to search for package returns a bunch of items, that when issued for installation are "not found". I.E. zypper easily mixes providers with real packages and has no distinction. Also, zypper ve/verify returned all okay. Zypper distro upgrade said all is fine.

Okay me thinks, that must be the guys from Tumbleweed having fun and decided to rollback to 13.1.
By the way asking about those cases on official Suse IRC, yast irc - brought nothing. over 300/80 people sitting without response.

So found the original package lists for 13.1, compared them to Tumbleweed, removed VLC repo(because it was tumbleweed based), changed MATE repo from Tumbleweed to 13.1 version and then fired zypper dup from init 3.
After 2 hour download and upgrade, the system booted up with all letters looking like squares.

That includes pre-boot LUKS password dialog and went all way through login manager and MATE. Apparently this is the definition of "nothing left to do" of zypper.
The only place with some letters were the ttys.

I decided that perhaps the kernel has some fonts that are carried over through initramfs and they are missing. So, init 3, and mkinitrd. After reboot, the boot screen was black and white, graphical boot was gone. I also noticed that I am carrying about 5 or 7 kernels....

Thank god I had Galaxy tab around, so I found out one more thing to try - "zypper dup --from repoID". I explicitly instructed zypper to upgrade to packages that are in repos of 13.1.... I haven't seen a worser package manager ever! Try finding out on internet how to downgrade Opensuse repo, or how to reinstall some package dependencies specific to some package... Nobody knows, that includes their IRC.

The "from" option did the trick, at least I have some letters now! Yay! I still have 8 kernels around, with Tumbleweed kernel not removed and I don't understand how to remove them from Yast, because all I am offered is a good hidden list of versions with crosses near them - and when I press such cross, it is always removing the newer kernel (not kernels, just one kernel) and tries to shift me to 3.7 era.

Also, yast is very badly structurized, completely unintuitive, with a configuration editor lying withing configuration editor (edit /etc/sysconfig)...!
Apparently the topmost advancement of them is to take all configuration into one file and place a GUI with bad navigation on top of it.

To sum up, the system comes bloated, is slow on dependency resolution, has very weird commands, is missing critical functionality, online documentation has a lot of blabla but very little on topic info, IRC guys are incompetent, management of versions of packages is near impossible, configuration tool is unintuitive (btw, this is first distro, where auto cleaning /tmp/ does NOT work), it fails to detect package breakages, it can't properly downgrade package tree - apparently no distinction between manually installed and pulled as dependency, I still can't figure out how to boot into different kernel - grub2 simply ignores keystrokes. This is a mess of a distro.

[TheBlackCat]

YAnd how relevant to OpenSUSE users is it that "the number of paid [SUSE employees] stays the same" if they're not working on OpenSUSE anymore? That's still a net loss of people working on OpenSUSE. In fact, by focusing their effort on OBS and OpenQA, they are indeed abandoning the distro proper. Anything else is just a word game.

OBS and OpenQA are components of openSUSE. The aren't "abandoning the distro proper", any more than having developers work on KDE or GNome patches would be. They are temporarily shifting their focus from one component of the distribution to another.

The fact of the matter is, there are only so many people paid to work on openSUSE. Spending more time in one area of openSUSE necessarily requires them spending less time on another area of openSUSE. There are things that need to be done in order to make openSUSE better. We can play semantic games all we want about whether they are still working on openSUSE or not. But at the end of the day, there is stuff that needs to get done, and this the only way it is going to happen.

[Cyber Killer]

And how relevant to OpenSUSE users is it that "the number of paid [SUSE employees] stays the same" if they're not working on OpenSUSE anymore? That's still a net loss of people working on OpenSUSE. In fact, by focusing their effort on OBS and OpenQA, they are indeed abandoning the distro proper. Anything else is just a word game.

They are still working on OpenSUSE - there is a lot more to a distro than just pushing new releases.

[alcalde]

5. This is only for the next release. Once the lower-level improvements are in finished the paid developers will return to their regular duties.

True. We hope.

[alcalde]

Read the mailing list...
1. nobody is abandoning anything
2. the OpenSUSE Team @SUSE is changing their work focus from releases to more lower level stuff, the number of paid staff stays the same

You seem to have missed the part where I said this is functionally equivalent. "The police are abandoning my neighborhood" and "The amount of officers is still the same; we're just not responding to calls in your neighborhood anymore" result in the identical impact to me; they're indistinguishable. And how relevant to OpenSUSE users is it that "the number of paid [SUSE employees] stays the same" if they're not working on OpenSUSE anymore? That's still a net loss of people working on OpenSUSE. In fact, by focusing their effort on OBS and OpenQA, they are indeed abandoning the distro proper. Anything else is just a word game.

>3. the OpenSUSE Team @SUSE is not the only team there working on OpenSUSE, there are many other that contribute too

Agreed, but this is about the impact it will have on OpenSUSE releases.

>4. the change is that the OpenSUSE community is going to be totally in charge of new releases (which can be good or bad depending on how it turns out)

It's more than just that they're in charge; they'll be the only ones contributing towards it.

[TheBlackCat]

Read the mailing list...
1. nobody is abandoning anything
2. the OpenSUSE Team @SUSE is changing their work focus from releases to more lower level stuff, the number of paid staff stays the same
3. the OpenSUSE Team @SUSE is not the only team there working on OpenSUSE, there are many other that contribute too
4. the change is that the OpenSUSE community is going to be totally in charge of new releases (which can be good or bad depending on how it turns out)

5. This is only for the next release. Once the lower-level improvements are in finished the paid developers will return to their regular duties.

[Cyber Killer]

There's no functional difference between "abandoning it" and "we're still here, we just aren't going to be working on it". Either way, they're not going to be contributing like they once did.

Read the mailing list...
1. nobody is abandoning anything
2. the OpenSUSE Team @SUSE is changing their work focus from releases to more lower level stuff, the number of paid staff stays the same
3. the OpenSUSE Team @SUSE is not the only team there working on OpenSUSE, there are many other that contribute too
4. the change is that the OpenSUSE community is going to be totally in charge of new releases (which can be good or bad depending on how it turns out)

[alcalde]

Same thing

No one is abandoning anything, the openSUSE team will be working in something else, namely the OBS and openQA for the next 8 months, that's all.

There's no functional difference between "abandoning it" and "we're still here, we just aren't going to be working on it". Either way, they're not going to be contributing like they once did.