First off, I’m relatively new to linux. I started last year, distro hopped a bit and have now been using Tumbleweed with KDE for the past 5 months. I love it, for a rolling release it has been very stable and easy to use.
Updating “wrong” might be the most common newbie mistake: I updated system packages via Discover until I read online that ‘zypper dup’ or Myrlyn is the correct way. It’s so easy to see the KDE notification and just press the button and not think much of it. I’ve also seen a couple users online use ‘zypper update’ command who didn’t know about dup.
I understand Tumbleweed is generally meant for more experienced users who are assumed to search the info themselves, but since there are these ‘alternative’ incorrect ways available I think it would be beneficial to have the update instructions more ‘in your face’ to new users, maybe in the welcome screen. What do you think?
General discussion about new user friendliness also welcome:)
There is nothing wrong with installing updated via Discover, it works fine. Whomever told you it was “wrong” to do so, was full of something.
The thing that Discover is unable to do, is resolve conflicts, if there’s an update problem. But those are relatively rare, if you’re sticking with the default repositories.
I fully concur with @sfalken , using Discover is 99.9% of the time fine. What I like about it is that is can do package, flatpak and BIOS/UEFI firmware updates all in one go.
That said, I also like the verbosity one gets when using sudo zypper dup -vvv, which shows all the details of what it is doing.
Well, this is more for people who aren’t bothered by these things than for more experienced users. If you’re constantly updating the entire system, sooner or later a problem might appear—a library that doesn’t work, or something else. That’s easily fixed by restoring a previous snapshot or making some adjustments. Many people don’t want to do that, even more experienced users.
And even then you still have time to use zypper dup or Myrlyn to update… or simply wait a day or two for whatever is causing the problems to be fixed.
Discover works fine for you? If yes, use it. I use it too.
I started using TW on one of my machines few days ago too and in overall, it’s quite good.
In short, negatives first:
/boot/efi may be too small if you have it from previous distro install and kernel updates can become a ‘funny’ problem. Installer should definitely warn about this.
Nvidia driver is a bit of a mess of packages and e.g. the G06 seemed broken about two days ago in terms of version mismatch between kmp and userspace parts, making it unusable. G07 is fine.
Great HW support, everything on my system works as it should.
KDE is great. Fast, stable, no problem here, I like it a lot.
Longterm kernel in a rolling distro is a great plus too.
Repos have practically all the software one may need, eliminating need for 3rd party repos. It’s nice I don’t have to compile Wine here.
I really wish there had been a bit more hand-holding in the installer on this point. I had no idea just how big the EFI partition needed to be, so I ended up with one which is way smaller than ideal.
The next rainy weekend, I’m planning a grand repartition and reinstall.
Think twice before you do … rumor has it openSUSE team has decided to switch default bootloader (TW) on uefi systems to systemd-boot … as BLS is problematic … choose new boot system or go traditional.
I read that as well. Systemd-boot isn’t as pretty and I’m not familiar with it like I am with good ol GRUB, but it seems like it might be a better choice.
I’m probably not going to get the reinstall done anytime soon between the really nice weather we’ve been having and my own propensity for putting things off, so I’ll keep an eye on how things go and maybe reinstall after the change is implemented.
I got bitten by the problem too, but I had space for two installed kernels. I did the reinstall anyway, because it was a clean installation and all of my data is on a separate drive, so it was quick.
And I switched to longterm 6.18 kernel as it’s easier to deal with, especially when it comes to Nvidia.
There is one thing I forgot about the installer. When I did the reinstall, I also formatted the partitions as I had to resize them for the bigger /boot/efi. And while doing so, I somehow missed the partition type for /boot/efi, so it wasn’t set properly to be EFI…
Installer just went on, installed all packages and during installation of boot loader, it failed.
Ok, I get it, it was my oversight, but it would be really better if the installer dealt with the bootloader first so that it doesn’t install everything first just to greet the user with this error.
Never ever bothered me, in my case it shows for 2 secs (!!!), I don’t need it to be pretty, I need the bootloader software to be working and future proof
Which reminds me…
Is anyone having that problem with the default grub in terms of its response time to keyboard strokes?
It’s terribly slow here. Not that I need to use it regularly and I see the screen for only 1 sec, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
I would imagine that the advice that using discover is “wrong” stems from the wiki, here, where it states;
For openSUSE Tumbleweed, zypper dup and Myrlyn is the only recommended way to update the system. Other tools like Plasma Discover or Gnome Software cannot resolve package conflicts which may arise by using external repositories.
Like it has been stated in the wiki and elsewhere in this thread, Discover cannot resolve conflicts. While these can then be resolved, it does seem like, according to the wiki anyway, Discover is not the recommended way to update. If that is the case, then I do feel like @sakves has a point and that there could be benefit in highlighting this nuance in the welcome screen.
In my opinion, KDE Discover “does the job” quite well and I use it regularly — because it is so convenient!
Its weakness I notice the most is, its inability to disentangle and solve package conflicts. You should be aware that, from times to times (more often in Tumbleweed / Slowroll than in Leap), you must go to Myrlyn to address them.
After my instal of TW and getting the hang of it in general (from other rpm based distros, I don’t use Debian based ones at all) I found out that dependency problems are almost non-existent if:
Packman isn’t used (not even “Essentials”)
Nvidia is installed manually, e.g. no ‘kmp-meta’ package
This way, conflicts are absolutely minimal or none, depending on what all the software one needs.
I never use any GUI tools for managing packages, so I can’t say anything about Discover or Myrlyn.
As for Packman, I personally don’t need it for anything, most people probably have it for codecs, but all the BD\DVD backups I have are in either h264 or AV1. And if I get some HEVC from the net, I can either quickly transcode it to AV1 (with NVEnc it’s quite fast and quality is great, even 4K ones) or, which is interesting, I can still play them just fine with any Gstreamer based player (I have Parole installed just for this case). For whatever reason, Gstreamer plugins from standard OpenSUSE repo are capable of dealing with HEVC, probably the ‘libav’ one. Maybe an oversight, who knows.
There is also a Gstreamer plugin for VLC, but I don’t recommend to use it. While it works, it could also leave a hanging vlc process if some problem with decoding is found.
Yes, 5070 absolutely has HW decoding for h265, plus VP9 and AV1 and all the older codecs.
I just don’t know why would libavcodec not utilize it for decoding as well. During playback in an Appimage version of MPV, whether using vdpau or nvdec, it works just fine, but openSuSE default mpv will refuse to open the file, whether HW decoding is enabled in any form or completely disabled. Which I would expect. Gstreamer you think can make the stream to be completely offloaded to GPU while the player, Parole in this case, can still control it? That would be interesting, because yes, Parole utilizes the video engine on GPU, as nvidia-settings demonstrate in my case.
I just tried to play some HEVC file using default openSuSE ‘ffplay’ directly. Without HW acceleration, it shows the spectrum analyzer with audio playing normally. With HW accel, the window is just transparent (only window border is visible) with audio playing normally again.
