So I decided a couple months ago I decided to make the plunge into using Linux as my desktop after years of tinkering with it on and off. I’ve also very casually managed a small number of Linux servers in the past ranging from RH, CentOS, Ubuntu, and openSUSE but mostly at an application/appliance level with simple Google answers/issues for work. I’ll try to keep this post short while sparing a LOT of additional details that I could add about my history with computers, history with Linux, and reasons for doing this now. I don’t like a lot of things about Canonical and Ubuntu (different and rather unimportant conversation I suppose), which was always my standard go-to for desktop Linux when I would try it out. After reading some things about different distros and seeing a presentation of openSUSE101 from Linuxfest Northwest I got really interested in openSUSE. Doing more and more research I kept hearing about how amazing SUSE was from an ideological standpoint, their incredible community, from a zypper/YAST standpoint, OBS, how great Tumbleweed is, code/feature parity between SLE and openSUSE, etc. I’m very excited about all of these things that openSUSE has to offer and let me be clear about this: I really want to get openSUSE to work for me. I’m starting to hit a list of “this is turning into a lot of problems” though and I’m reaching out to the community now that I’ve heard so much about to hopefully be able to keep using it and become a constructive and contributing member.
Right off the bat let me highlight a couple of neat points about openSUSE.
- KDE on openSUSE is really nice
I’ve never seriously used KDE before. In the past (many years ago) it felt slow and buggy. I seemed to always have issues with it and the defaults on whatever distro(s) I tried it on always seemed really odd. I’m not sure if this is because of changes in KDE or just the openSUSE implementation of it but it’s really great! I think I’ve been sold on KDE at this point because it just seems to fit for me. It’s clean and fast and I can easily adjust everything that I want.
- Tumbleweed is awesome
I tried arch 3-4 years ago and it was a massive headache. I finally got it installed and running for a couple days then some update came in with a config file change. I followed the process on their wiki on how to best handle the update. It took a couple of hours to go through it all but I finally got it all figured out and everything worked fine. A couple days later another update came in for the same config file, I went through the same process being very careful about the entire thing. Regardless of my best efforts I ran into boatloads of issues and was left with the options of leaving with a severely broken system or starting over again after about a week. I recognize that this may well have been my fault, but the effort required just to process a simple update was obscene and resulted in a broken system anyways despite great care being taken during the update process. Tumbleweed? It just works. zypper ref && zypper dup --no-allow-vendor-change and everything just works. Every. Time. It’s wonderful!
- Lots of systems that seem cool that I haven’t learned how to use yet but want to
OBS looks awesome. I have no idea how to use it but it seems really great. OpenQA seems pretty great. SUSE Studio and Kiwi look pretty neat. I don’t have an immediate need for any of them but the fact that these services exist and are available for use by the whole Linux community is fantastic and gives me lots of hope.
That all being said let me share some pain points that I currently have. They started as onesie-twosie little things that I thought “Well, I guess I can figure out a workaround later” or “Maybe I can live without that” but they’re really starting to add up. I’m starting to feel like it’s the “death by a thousand paper cuts” scenario and I’m just not sure if these are simple things that I should be able to easily address or if the openSUSE distribution just isn’t for me. I’m hoping that some feedback and suggestions from the community might give me some better direction on how to approach and handle some of these issues. Maybe they’re legitimate issues. Maybe I’m just being daft. Hopefully some of you can let me know.
- Local Media
Getting media codecs seems more complicated that it should be. There are some 1-click install packages out there for both KDE and Gnome, but the Gnome one doesn’t seem to work right and gave me some cryptic errors when trying to run it. One of the troubleshooting threads I found even had a response that said to another user with the same issues “Oh you must be trying to use the 1-click codec installer for Gnome. Yeah that package doesn’t work.” Installing the KDE one seemed to work fine but then going to open a file with any player of the 4 that I tried still gave me errors about being unable to display the videos due to missing codecs. I tried multiple different video files and multiple different players and all came back with the same results. Okay, maybe I can live without that by just importing all of my stuff into PLEX and watching it through the local PLEX web interface. I get it that there are possible solutions there, but there’s a bunch of work needed.
- PLEX Media Server
Some sources just say “Go ahead and download the Fedora/CenOS versions and it’ll work fine!”. Neither of those worked for me. So I kept looking and found some threads on the forums here that had all sorts of different suggestions. “Change group ownership!” tried that with no results. “Change some config files!” but then the config files don’t exist. Then I found a Reddit thread that says “Oh yeah it’s a pain and doesn’t work right. Just download it and then run it in docker. Here’s a bunch of docker commands and workarounds you need for that to work.” Dang, really? My options are keep hacking away at it or learn docker? I get it that there are possible solutions there, but there’s a bunch of work needed.
- VPN
I have a Private Internet Access subscription for VPN. It’s important to me to keep this running for security. Firefox doesn’t have a plugin option and has to be configured kind of goofy to turn it on/off and doesn’t have an easy way to make on-the-fly changes. I can get around this and get around the Flash slowness issues of Firefox and Flash by installing Chrome, but I would rather not just based on principals and trying to de-Google my life. I get it that there are possible solutions there, but there’s a bunch of work needed for a half-functional solution. I also understand that this issue is on the side of PIA, but it’s still a pain point.
- BOINC
I would really like to run BOINC to help contribute to Rosetta@Home. There’s repos available but they don’t work. I tried building from source but it doesn’t seem to like the openSUSE OpenSSL configuration to complete the build. I found a link from someone who made a build for openSUSE and posted it on their site but it’s not tied to a repo for updates and it doesn’t run as a service normally that I can see and it needs some more manual things done to get it to start working so I still need to hack it up a bit and then manually run it every time I start the OS or set up tasks to do that instead of running it through systemctl. I get it that there are possible solutions there, but there’s a bunch of work needed.
These things individually can be overlooked but like I mentioned earlier it’s starting to feel like the “death by a thousand paper cuts” scenario. There’s a couple more things that I didn’t mention that are less important. Am I just not “hardcore” enough for openSUSE? Am I overlooking simple solutions? It pains me to know that all of these issues are instantly solved by using Ubuntu. I can select the “install 3rd party” option on the install screen, I can go grab the .deb for PIA, PLEX, and BOINC and I’m all done within minutes. I know this because a month ago I did it and had all of it working within a couple hours from the time I started the OS install. Missing out on Tumbleweed would be sad and not supporting what seems like a really awesome distro in openSUSE would make me sad, but first and foremost I just need something that works and don’t want to make getting applications to function a hobby in itself (a la Arch). What thoughts and feedback do you have for me?
