Future of Suse without YaSt

[shundhammer]

@distort3dpixel

I wish @shundhammer would add opinion to this, given his long contributions and passion to various projects…

OK, here is the promised answer; or rather gathering several posts that I wrote previously about the topic. This thread summarizes most of it:

Agama installation experience

The forum software ate my first attempt of this answer next try. Many aspects of Leap 16.0 and its underlying SLFO (ex-ALP) platform are quite controversial. The initial idea behind ALP (later SLFO) was an absolutely minimalistic skeleton Linux system to only run workloads (Docker / Podman containers) and nothing else; quite a radical departure from a traditional Linux with multiple users and local software that you could use, graphical desktop environments like KDE Plasma, GNO…

Agama installation experience

[part 2] But in addition to the changes of the SLFO platform base, as a “.0” version this was one of the few chances to implement other radical changes; we couldn’t do most of those during the lifetime of a major SLES release. What is released with SLE-15 will need to remain for all the service packs (SLE-15 SP1, -SP2, …, -SP7) until they run out of maintenance (regular as well as LTS). For example, exchanging YaST2 for something new could only happen now with the new SLES-16.0, or in 10 or 12…

Agama installation experience

I feel your pain. My prediction is that in a number of aspects the powers that be will need to backpedal. But what aspects that will be is anybody’s guess. When we started this transition and ALP was still the target we (the YaST team) asked the same questions, and the replies were along the lines of “the business customers and partners have their own custom workflows and configurations for those services anyway” or “this is all run in containers these days, and those are beyond our scope”. Or…

Also in Bugzilla:

• https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1243900#c1
• https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1243900#c2

So, why Myrlyn?

YaST is on its way out. It’s only a matter of time. For Leap 16.0 / SLES-16.0, it’s already officially gone. Yes, you can do some tricks to bring it back to life in the NCurses mode on Leap 16.0, but that’s just a glitch in the matrix; don’t rely on it.

This would leave you with Discover in KDE Plasma or GNOME Software in GNOME, both offering you mostly the high-level applications that are tailored to that specific desktop; and the zypper command line.

This would be it. That was the plan. Nothing else. Nada. Gar nix.

So I decided for the 2025 SUSE Hack Week to “liberate” my good old YQPkg, the YaST Qt Package selector, so it could become a standalone program. I had written the first iteration back in the early 2000s, then later with SUSE 10.1 I did the port to libzypp.

That part had been sorely neglected for many years; there simply was never time to maintain it well. So much YaST stuff to do, so little time.

And then with the advent of 16.0 and the looming demise of YaST, I decided to take a sharp scalpel and cut this part out of YaST; it was a pure Qt high-level widget. But it needed some glue code to hold it together; loading and refreshing the repositories for startup (which had been done in YaST Ruby code before), and executing the package transaction, i.e. download and install the packages.

And so Myrlyn (initially named YQPkg) was born. Because I wanted it, and because I thought many users would want something like it, too.

Right now on Tumbleweed, they coexist: YaST sw_single, Myrlyn, zypper.

You can use them alternatingly, but if you want a GUI you will very soon realize that Myrlyn not only offers some extra features (zypper dup and zypper up equivalent, much advanced zypp history, advanced search features), but also received all those little fixes that YaST sw_single never got over the years, such as the package list and details views initially filled, subtle GUI enhancements to make it look less baroque and 90s style, a non-root read-only mode, and more.

I consciously decided against an NCurses TUI mode: This was the one thing that had always held us back in YaST. We always had to take into account that any UI also needed to fit into a 1968 VT-100 80x24 text terminal, and limit UI complexity accordingly. This is why we had to endure all the young “kewl” kids on social media complaining about the “ugly 90s look”.

For the package selector, there were actually two completely separate versions in YaST: YQPkg, the Qt version, and an NCurses version based on libyui-ncurses, the C++ widget set. It was literally duplicate work, and the NCurses version was not only more limited (because of the 80x24 minimum window size), it was also much more complex to implement.

I am not going to duplicate this again for an NCurses Myrlyn. There is always the zypper command line; it may not be as convenient, but it can do the same operations and more.

For servers, we (the YaST team) were told that our business customers would either use one of the one-to-many management tools like SUSE Manager (today known as SUSE Multi-Linux Manager) or one of Puppet, SALT, Ansible, Ignition / Combustion.

Whatever; I don’t know if this is an entirely realistic assessment of the situation.

But Myrlyn is intended for the openSUSE community. Business customers are welcome to use it as well within its constraints, but I will always be on guard against any attempt of enshittification just because some business partner wants to showcase their favorite proprietary package, or goes crazy with license pop-ups.

Case in point: There is already a license cache in Myrlyn that takes great care to present every OEM license (like NVidia) only once. If you already confirmed this exact license text during this program run, the other 29 packages that also want to display it will get it confirmed automatically without bothering you again.

I personally use Myrlyn all the time. I will do whatever I can do keep it well usable.

YaST on the other hand will go away some time in the not too distant future. It was good while it lasted, but everything must come to an end eventually.

It’s not dead yet, but it sure smells funny.