I know these types of posts are annoying, but I am so frustrated I can’t tell you; I apologise in advance and am happy to be pointed in the direction of a miracle.
I have been exclusively running OpenSUSE on my home PCs for over 15 years (since Mandriva died and before Mandrake existed, like most at the time, I ran Slackware), with few problems until I found that some binary release software (MakeMKV) needed the version of glibc in 15.6. As with previous releases I upgraded in place from 15.5, only to find so many things were broken. After spending a couple of days trying to fix them I gave up and did a fresh install, with all that entails around backing up and restoring. OMG everything is still broken, I have never had a release like this. My hardware isn’t new, but it is an i7, 32 GB RAM, reasonable Nvidia board (1600), quality HDDs etc. and will do pretty much anything I need.
I’ve spent my entire weekend trying to get somewhere close to something I can use, but simply haven’t the time to continue (I didn’t have the weekend spare either). Even the desktop is borked, neither KDE+X11 nor KDE+Wayland will reliably resume from suspend for example.
I fully appreciate that this is a combination of software releases with various issues that are all getting me and my hardware and not the fault of OpenSUSE per se, but my hardware is neither esoteric, nor low end, and I simply don’t think 15.6 should have been released like this.
Although I am forced to run Ubuntu on my work laptop (or Windows - yuck) I have resisted the spread of Canonical so far as my own PCs are concerned. Now I think I have no choice, I just can’t spare the time it is costing to to try (and fail) to get OpenSUSE working well enough to use for anything much more than web browsing (and I can’t even shade my Firefox window anymore!).
Apart from a slightly bitter moan, my point is that releases like this (and it is six months after the initial release of 15.6 that I installed it!) can damage the user base. We aren’t all in our 20’s anymore with time to play. Although in some ways, it was easier when you had to roll your own kernel, fight to get a sound card working, get the dialler to work with your modem etc.
I understand your frustration, but just telling stories won’t get you any help.
And if you "simply haven’t the time to continue " is there any worth in trying to help you?
Anyway…
Just telling “everything is broken” does not help. What is the most needed/annoying thing that doesn’t work? Maybe a specific question in the right subforum might attract helpers.
Showing system details, e.g. by the output of:
inxi -SAGxxz
(from any distro, not necessarily openSUSE) should help us help you.
Showing the list of your current repositories by:
zypper lr -d
and if that is OK, trying to be up to date with:
zypper dup
should assure us that you have a consistent set of software installed.
Judging from personal experience and browsing the Forums I (and likely many here) think that Leap 15.6 is as good as any Leap, but something might always go wrong on specific configurations or specific needs and we are here to help fellow users when that happens.
I know, it was a fairly useless post, sorry. We already interacted on one minor problem in another thread (which I did find a solution for). I’ve been running Linux systems for nearly 30 years, albeit I’m not as up to date these days as we’ve shifted in various way, such as init to system d, X to wayland etc.
As I said, I spent many hours trying to sort out problems with the upgrade and then tried a clean install and still had many problems. I’m not expecting people to solve them for me, it’s my gear and my job to find the answers.
On my work Ubuntu laptop right now, but if only for the record I’ll post those outputs to the thread tomorrow.
As examples, the most critical things are neither KDE on X, nor KDE on Wayland work without issues, including coming back from resume (sometimes restarting plasma from a VT helps, sometimes have to kill the session, sometimes the whole machine crashes and can’t get to a VT), Kmail isn’t handling IMAP properly (inbox folder issues) and akonadi in general appears to have become pretty broken TBH, VirtualBox has issues (screen resize, performance) which make it unusabler whether I use the OpenSUSE version or the Oracle supplied 7.1 (modules are all loaded fine).
There are a bunch of other minor annoyances too (no window shading in KDE+Wayland!). Most of these I’ve found references to around the web, but no working solutions.
I do wonder if some of the issues are to do with NVidia drivers (I have a GTX1650 and running the G06 drivers with no apparent issues looking at the logs)… Will post with the info later in case there is something discordant in there I haven’t spotted. Appreciated the polite response anyway!
Gnome user here, only occasionally logging in to KDE for testing, so I cannot be of much help.
Judging from Forum posts it looks like Wayland is not yet as ready on KDE, especially for those using Nvidia; things might have improved with the recent 570.86.16 nvidia driver, but I cannot tell for sure.
Resuming from sleep might be tricky with power saving features on Nvidia, you may find a few relevant threads in the HW subforum, or you might ask for help there.
I cannot comment on specific KDE apps and experts are unlikely to hang by the Open Chat subforum.
I have a similar history of using Linux (well over 30 years), and Unix-based systems prior to Linux. For the most part, been with openSUSE for quite a long time. But our “challenging issues” were with Tumbleweed.
We’ve since switched our various machines to Leap 15.6. And with that, our maintenance nightmares have subsided. Currently playing around with Leap 16 Alpha in a VirtualBox virtual machine, to see what’s next.
. So, anyway … one question: what distro are you contemplating switching to?
.
BTW - look at the screenshot below … that’s Firefox with its window in “shade” mode. There’s a setting in KDE in Window Behavior–Titlebar Actions–Double Click option to change the behavior - the default is Maximize (window) - simply change to Shade. The other thing is to be sure that Firefox is set to show the System Titlebar are Frame.
Judging from Forum posts it looks like Wayland is not yet as ready on KDE, especially for those using Nvidia
Yeah, I know, I was trying it in case resume worked without crashing plasma and freezing the screen. In fact it comes back about 2 in 3 times, vs X, which fails every time.
The is no window shading with KDE in Wayland, it’s blanked out. You were right about Firefox in X though, the titlebar wasn’t enabled (menu bar was), I can’t beleive how far hidden it was to enable it!
So, anyway … one question: what distro are you contemplating switching to?
That’s is my problem or it would already be done! Kubuntu, Neon, Arch - all of them have reasons why I prefer OpenSUSE. However, so far I have spent 20+ hours of my limited spare time trying to solve the big issues that prevent my using my home setup in any practical way without taking steps unreasonable steps like disabling resume. I’ve switched to Thunderbird due to Akonadi/Kmail issues, but akonadi is still intervening in my desktop (notifications, background activity) and Thunderbird isn’t integrated into KDE.
If I knew I could sort the blockers that would be OK, but you can’t go on for ever.
@solanum If you would like to pursue receiving technical assistance with getting openSUSE working for you, I can split this topic and move the technical posts to an appropriate category. Or you can leave this as an informal general discussion.
Between you and me, Wayland is not ready.
Does not offer Shading? Really?
90 percent of Wayland does NOT work on our machines - we only use X11. (many will argue with me, but sit behind me at one of my machines and I’ll show you that it does not work here!!)
We have also disabled Akonadi … it’s been horribly troublesome in the past, and for us, offers zero advantages, so disabled it.
And to confirm your potential distro options … here’s my opinion. We would NEVER choose a distro from an organization that is not heavily involved in the commercial Linux business.
For example: there is SUSE and Red Hat. They are heavily involved in Enterprise operating systems. That knowledge trickles down.
Anyway, if you venture off to another distro, you will have to “learn how to do things their way”, which can be a frustrating process
BTW … I see your list of repos … wow!! I’m a bit perplexed why so many have been added. Quite possibly causing an issue.
Except for duplicate entries of {cdn,download}.opensuse.org, which shouldn’t do harm, solanum’s repo list is quite clean to my knowledge. Only three third party repos: Nvidia, packman and virtualbox. No random devel or home: repos.
Yeah, I haven’t added any repos yet except pacman, virtualbox and nvidia, the rest were all added by the install. The dup is because the usb I installed from also added itself and I haven’t deleted it yet. Also, none of the debug stuff is enabled.
I don’t want to drop OpenSuse and having calmed down a bit I’ll give it a bit more time, but if I can’t fix the resume from suspend, virtualbox and the bootloader failure to recognise other OSs (yes probe is ticked and all other bootloaders are on other partitions/drives), then I have no choice. The bunch of other issues are minor and/or have workarounds.
Since you are apparently multi-booting, are you sure that it is the openSUSE bootloader that is in charge? The bootloader needs to be updated from the system that installed it.
Yep, definitely OpenSUSE (EFI) bootloader is on the first drive and being booted from BIOS. It was set up with the bootloaders for other OSs on their own drives. No problem prior to the reinstall and no problem with prior versions of Leap that recognised the other OSs and dealt with them fine.
To be fair, other than ticking the ‘probe’ box in the Yast bootloader GUI I haven’t started to look for the problem yet as it is third priority…
Yep for sure, as I mentioned, not chased it past the GUI yet.
Just had a new problem crop up, the Steam app (just the Steam UI, no game running) has been having random freezes, the new issue is it just coincided with plasma crashing X completely and taking me back to SDDM… (nothing to do with resume)
It seriously bugs me that NVidia can act this way and millions of people’s work hours get dismissed as “buggy”. The code/distro etc. are fine, it is your driver which is the issue.
I fresh-installed Tumbleweed and noticed the KDE defaults to X11 -again-. Just before I sent a bug report, I remembered NVidia and cancelled.
I unfortunately cannot help that much, but as someone that’s been running openSUSE Tumbleweed for a very long time on a bunch of NVidia cards, I can give you my perspective on things.
Initially, it was a pain.
But as I slowly figured things out I can say that I’m very comfortably today using openSUSE Tumbleweed, without any major issues at all.
The major issue early on was Wayland and NVidia, and simply switching to Xorg helped a lot.
The second issue was that KDE Plasma was extreme unstable.
Just switching theme or toggling options too fast would crash it, apps were behaving oddly, some things would just freeze and KDE Plasma would throw me back to my Display Manager, forcing me to login again.
However, XFCE, while not as fancy, has been stable for many years now.
And with just a few minor tweaks in some menus and a theme switch, I think XFCE can look very nice!
The only issue I really have today is that zypper loves to remove random applications when I update.
Like the Heroic Launcher and YouTube Music open-source app, which are both installed via a downloaded .RPM file.
