A LEAP of faith

English Open Chat
1

I did get opensuse LEAP 15.1 and KDE on my current travel laptop, which I used to have Debian on. There were a few challenges…

This system has a broadwell chipset with integrated Intel video. Hardware autodetect apparently failed on really detecting this correctly, for the install failed to include the xf86 intel video driver at all. After some horrors fighting the compositor in KDE, where it would sometimes shimmer the ui, and stick in areas of blackness, particularly in firefox when editing text in a search box, or tear horribly with the xrender one, I added what I thought would be a normal 20-intel.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.org.d to set the tear free option and considered tinkering with other options, which I used to do with debian on it to deal with similar xfwm tearing behavior. This is how I found out it never installed the intel xorg server to begin with.

After installing the intel xf86 server to match my changed xorg config, video really did stabilize. However, the compositor stuttered and froze on the main screen when plugging in an external monitor. After playing with compositor settings in KDE, in particular setting vsync to none rather than auto, all was well, and while this system never had much video performance, I can say it actually does perform better with kde and the opengl compositor than it did with debian and xfce’s one. But the compositor settings had to be hand tuned in KDE. By comparison, I did try a wayland session, and found that kind of broken in ways that killed usability. So I still feel Wayland is a long way off despite so many distros pushing it for prime time.

The other major problem is that wifi/nm does not seem to be all that happy with kdewallet. It tries to connect at login, stalls for 45 seconds, and the fails with no secrets error. It then automatically connects immediately afterward on its own as if nothing was ever wrong. So I set my wifi password in the global settings, rather than storing in kwallet, and set wifi connections to be shared for all users. Doing that, wifi connects right away and is up even before KDE completes login. It is clear this is some kind of wallet/nm interaction that is going wrong.

I tried kmail, but google rejects giving it access, so I brought back thunderbird, which I used on it before, and actually I also have a non-well known tutanota email. Gmail is my junk mail sinkhole, which is why I use it as the main email address I publish.

Bluetooth was also a small challenge. This laptop had a bcm chipset for bluetooth, and the associated bluetooth firmware, which is in the repo, also was not installed. So the main takeaway for me is that I feel acting on yast hardware detect and using it for initial package selection can be improved in the existing installer. But once it was up and stable, openSUSE and KDE are lovely to work with.

2

Hi,
Thx for posting!
As you’ve discovered, openSUSE moves faster to incorporate new technology than Debian, so depending on your personal setup may need to fix problems Debian people won’t see for quite some time… But the rewards can be there, too. New technology often works better than old. New features can give you new options. And, on some systems new technology might be the only way for some things to work.

I think a lot of people will agree with you about Wayland (and I assume that is the reason why you didn’t find a running X server at first. Although Wayland can deploy as an X server, by default it sets up to run as a Unix or Network socket service. This and some implementations of VNC are the first of where all of Linux is moving towards in the future). Wayland is a project very long in development, but if you compare to what it was 3 years ago it’s come a long way in numerous ways (today supports remote connections, there is at least one experimental compositor alternative, more). The problem many find with Xorg is that today it’s enormous and a big plate of spaghetti, lacking internal efficiency, and has gotten so bad no one wants to try to refactor it. Wayland is the attempt to build something from the ground up that is far better, and even from the beginning some of what it can do for fancy Desktop effects has been amazing… If you want to see what Wayland <really> can do, install the Enlightenment Desktop and switch over to it (which again is a nice feature of openSUSE, unlike many of its competitors, installing alternative DE and switching back and forth is easy… The WM is the only thing I see that doesn’t change so is shared between DE but that can be adjusted manually, too).

That NM/Kwallet issue has been described a few times… I expect there are bug reports about it and will be resolved, likely upstream sometime.

Kmail and Google is a fairly well known problem (You can Google the problem and find it reported on other distros as well).

And yes, Broadcom has a licensing policy that conflicts with openSUSE FOSS policy which is unusually strict (mentioned various places and in my openSUSE slide deck). I’d be speculating, I assume it’s also why Broadcom drivers aren’t distributed by the Linux kernel like most other drivers today. Efforts have been made to try to ease the pain of installing and configuring Broadcom drivers, but until Broadcom modifies its licensing, distros with strict use policies like openSUSE will be affected.

Hope you’re enjoying your LEAP of Faith!

TSU

3

I am actually rather happy with it. I pretty much have been able to get everything I normally use on it working, too. I took it to our user group meeting yesterday, too.

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The most intricate issue I had to deal with so far is the way Debian does qemu static launchers, and how that interacts with my chroot builder, produceit, vs what openSUSE does. I found I needed to add the OC flags to the binfmt .conf files to get setuid to work in the foreign architecture chroot, and copy both the base and -binfmt exec for the architecture into it, but it also works better because it supports persistence for the qemu user launcher, rather than dumbly appending it to the front of everything you launch inside the chroot. So actually once I did get that figured out, the result was better.

5

There’s this recent KMail developer blog: <https://www.dvratil.cz/2019/08/kontact-google-integration-issue/&gt;.

When I registered Kontact I forgot to list some of the data points that Kontact needs access to. Google has noticed this after a while and asked us to clarify the missing bits. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to react within the given time limit and so Google has preemptively blocked login for all new users.

I forward all my GMail and Outlook e-Mail traffic to accounts setup with my ISP anyway …

6

Just thought I would chime in on the Kmail/Gmail issue since I use both and have it successfully set up. There is a trick to it that can make it work.

If you set the Gmail account to use 2FA then you can create what they call “App Passwords”. Then when you configure Kmail to connect to Gmail, initially it will fail. Just go back into the config for that account and change it to use the Plain method instead of Gmail. Then use the App Password you created and it will work. :slight_smile:

I’ve been using that method for a while now and it seems to work without issues. Hope that helps!

7

Got the dreaded box on Friday(15.0 no longer updates), so I got the iso and made the media. Installed today. BING-BANG-BOOM! Fastest. cleanest, for any distro I’ve installed since 13. EVERYTHING works! Right out of the box! Even Nvidia drivers! EVEN WITH windows(THREE partitions of windows) multi-boot!
Thanx, guys!
Beers on me!:shake:

8

Now that I have had it in use for a few weeks, in truth I have been really happy with leap. There are some very specific quirks that annoy a little, but in terms of problems, or issues, compared to either other distros or desktops I have worked with, no. So I have been able to focus on getting back to getting things done I wish to do this year.

9

I’m glad to hear that. And thanks for that update.

10

I"m also glad and very thankful!