Advice about opensuse on system76 Pangolin (Pang12)

English Install/Boot/Login
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Hi all,

I currently have a System76 Pangolin (‘pang12’ the latest as of May 2023) running fedora KDE edition , Ive been using Opensuse Tumbleweed xfce edition on my old Thinkpad t540p and I have a intel NUC running fedora server edition.

I would be really interested to run Opensuse Tumbleweed on the Pangolin and maybe eventually , when I can stomach redoing the server , switching to Opensuse leap or maybe MicroOS but that’s for another time.

I know I have to install addition packages from a separate repo as I did on fedora , but the Opensuse System76 repo doesn’t seem to be maintained as far as I can see from what I could workout it appears to be behind a release or 2.

Has anyone got opensuse currently running on a Pangolin? or even better the latest pangolin?

thanks in advance for the advice .

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System76 only provides a kind of base support for Arch, Fedora, PopOS, Ubuntu and NIxOS.

So you could try to use a openSUSE live image and test if it works satifactory for you.

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I’m a fellow System76 user (I have a Thelio Major myself, not a laptop) - I found that openSUSE Tumbleweed worked pretty much without any of the custom drivers.

Laptops tend to be a little fussier, but you might grab the LiveUSB and try booting it and see what works and what doesn’t.

The repo you linked to is a “home” repo - so it’s not an official repo, but someone’s attempt to build the packages using the build service.

Go to openSUSE Tumbleweed - Get openSUSE and click the “Alternate Downloads” and you’ll see the LiveUSB media that you can download.

I really love my System76 system, but I have found that they’re less willing to provide detailed help if you’re not running Pop_OS - they’re super friendly, and will point you at the git repos, but there’s not a lot of documentation about the options they use to build the software for each of their systems, which would be super helpful for those running other Linux operating systems.

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I think your both right I will have to try the LiveUSB and se how I get on , I might contact system76 and see if they can give me any advice as well. I imagine the fans will be an issue without the drivers and the maybe the backlit keyboard. The limited support for other OS’s is the only flaw on an otherwise perfect laptop

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Official 76 support might hesitate offering advice, so if reluctant, might post at a 76 forum.

As far as fans go, I recently configured them via the machine’s native BIOS … for my machines, that overrides the OS.

Admittedly, what you see below, and my previous paragraph relates to my AMD desktop, not a 76 laptop.

20230515_103720-01

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well it looks like Great news as you said @hendersj , I reached out to system76 and asked about the system76driver and associated packages and it seems that with the pangolin (pang12) none of it is really required.
From my test with the LiveUSB of tumbleweed.

Wifi and bluetooth worked

The camera, microphone(which doesnt work on fedora) and speakers all worked

keyboard backlight works

and fans and thermal are in the firmware not software.

firmware will have to be updated with a PopOS liveUSB, as explained on system76 website, but this was the same for fedora as well.

basically the main thing was the kernel, but most of the patches from sysytem76 have been added to the mainline kernel now.

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That’s good to know. On my Thelio Major, I don’t have issues with the fans, but laptops can certainly vary. Firmware updates can often be done with fwupdmgr - but a liveUSB would suffice as well (in fact, I may need to look into that, as I have an installation of PopOS on my HDD that doesn’t work - and I occasionally want to be able to run it just to test things out).