I have tried it from beginning, and first impressions were very poor and made me doubt a lot. Meantime however, it has become my favorite operating system as had been Leap 42.3 before, and now it even recognizes my Eaton UPS without any problems (e.g. till today, Tumbleweed does not)!
Everybody should understand any SUSE edition requiring hours of work whenever picked for a setup due to individual needs as asked by myself. Though, the only thing really to count is the fact lastly becoming successful. Me, hardened by years of nearly desperate failures on several Linux systems I don’t persue any more setup other than using Xfs partitions and the Xfce desktop only. So finally I want to give you a few hints for a happy setup hereby:
Always activate “untested repositories” before going on to check the desktop environment and other software you like to get installed,
for partitioning unconditionally check using the expert installer, and never forget starting from preexisting partition layout only (!!!),
make ample usage of the great offerings of SUSE repositories, as well catching Yast’s possibility of setting priorities and all those other switches evenly including package taboos - the process of learning might be hard for you, but at last it will make you very glad,
if longing for perfect multimedia features be aware of having to add or update a two dozen packages from Packman repository : )
Don’t. Install an openQA tested desktop environment of your choice, activate the distro online repos, nothing else.
For new users? Nah, accept the proposal and you’ll end up with a working system
Don’t. These ‘untested’ repos, f.e. home: repos are packagers’ / developers’’ repos, these are the repos where they can ( and should and will ) break things.
Dear OpenSUSE administrators and other politicians: Don’t be too selfish!
Your distribution is professionally worked out - especially regarding the Leap 15.0 origin from that cruel SLE 15 Beta (I had tried it: What a great way gone!) -, but you should keep in mind it has never been truly designed for any ordinary Linux user! There’s no doubt about one guy modifying anything of the preset will always be held responsible for that all alone : ) However, the preset of OpenSUSE evenly may be called exotic in some way. So mostly, it requires arrangement …
Me, I know well why (at least currently) not following KDE Plasma and Btrfs and some other fashionable directions within the Linux world. Because of those few disagreements, do you really want me change to Fedora Rawhide as I have already done before? Or will you better allow me using OpenSUSE my way?
Just one more point important for me: I always demand my system must work together with the current stable Linux kernel! (And Leap 15.0 actually does!! Just an hour ago I caught 4.16.11 …)
Of course we “allow” using openSUSE your own way. It’s just that what works well for you might not be good advice to other users with different backgrounds.
Oh, and by the way, I do think Leap 15.0 is going to turn out to be an excellent release.
While I’m responding, I’ll comment on your opening post:
Always activate “untested repositories” before …
Personally, I mostly stay with the standard repos + packman. And that’s the best advice for most users. But I will be thinking about whether to use the “extra” repo for firefox. But I’ll probably settle with what’s in the standard repos.
check using the expert installer
I assume you mean the “expert partitioner”. I almost always use that. But I don’t recommend it to people who are not already experienced with partitioning.
make ample usage of the great offerings of SUSE repositories
I do that. I often install additional package to play with and learn. And I install additional desktops for play. What’s nice about openSUSE, is that there is a lot of software available in the standard repos (plus packman).
As for priorities – I give packman a priority of 98, which is slightly better than the default 99. It usually doesn’t matter, because of vendor stickiness. But if I am installing something completely new and it is in both packman and the standard repos, then this priority choice will prefer packman. That seems appropriate for my usage. If I add a special purpose repo, I will probably give that a priority of 100 or higher. That’s a deliberately worse priority, because I normally don’t want to accidentally install something new from that repo.
I haven’t yet tried Leap 15, but where I think I might have sympathy for OP is the default exotic BTRFS arrangement
proposed by the installer (assuming it’s the same for 15 as it is for previous Leap version). While the arrangement
makes perfect sense, it which will be incomprehensible and intimidating to GNU/Linux newcomers. I do think an option to
set the proposer to a more traditional ext4/swap is really overdue and would be trivial to implement.
The option is actually there. Instead of using the expert partitioner, click on “Guided setup”. There you can indicate what file system to use, whether to use an LVM, and other options.
However, it isn’t the most obvious, and many users won’t try that option.
While snapshotting may be useful, copy-on-write filesystems inevitably suffer performance degradation as fragmentation
gets out of control with age. I believe most openSUSE users would be prepared to lose snapshotting to avoid regular
defragmentation. I’m not suggesting for a moment openSUSE drops/deprecates BTRFS, but it seems to be very bizarre
default choice.
I do not use btrfs, but from what I read here, a lot of people love the snapshots it can give you and the ability to fall back after an update that broke something.
On 2018-05-24, nrickert <nrickert@no-mx.forums.microfocus.com> wrote:
> flymail;2866396 Wrote:
>> I think ext4/swap should be the default.
>
> That’s what I have been using.
I generally use xfs/swap but have been monkeying about with BTRFS for /home/.
On 2018-05-24, hcvv <hcvv@no-mx.forums.microfocus.com> wrote:
> I do not use btrfs, but from what I read here, a lot of people love the
> snapshots it can give you and the ability to fall back after an update
> that broke something.
… which does rather beg the question: why don’t you use btrfs?
Again, what I read from the firums, those “broken something after update” happens mostly with TW (please take note, I do not say TW often brakes things, but it seems to brake things more often then Leap, which is logical because a new TW will have far more new packages then batch of security and recommended patches for Leap).
I do not use TW.
And my ext4 file systems are rock solid for years. I love rock solid. I am a very conservative user. I am mostly very unhappy even with going from 42.2 to 42.3 to 15.0, etc. Why should I? Everything is working. Why changing and then having the same thing? Or worse, not having the same thing, but some singing and dancing feature I did not ask for and I can not find how to switch it off. Or a button I clicked on without looking for years and that is now on a different place? I hate switching my car also. Thus not using btrfs fits my personal approach.
On 2018-05-24, hcvv <hcvv@no-mx.forums.microfocus.com> wrote:
> flymail;2866410 Wrote:
>> … which does rather beg the question: why don’t you use btrfs?
> Again, what I read from the firums, those “broken something after
> update” <SNIP>
Fair enough!
On 2018-05-24, hcvv <hcvv@no-mx.forums.microfocus.com> wrote:
> And my ext4 file systems are rock solid for years. I love rock solid. I
> am a very conservative user. I am mostly very unhappy even with going
> from 42.2 to 42.3 to 15.0, etc. Why should I? Everything is working. Why
> changing and then having the same thing? <SNIP>
In which case I strongly suggest you avoid Gentoo GNU/Linux, where you expect problems during or after every update -
and if you don’t update after a month or so, it can take hours/days of configuring/compiling before you have a
normalling working system again!
I do not think a suggested anywhere that I was interested in such a thing (even if I would know it exists). So no need to warn me for it, or for crossing a highway on foot, or many other things that never come to my mind.
I will freely admit that I hate the hardware side. So, for me the “Guided setup” is the easiest way to do full disk encryption. Everytime I try to set it up in “Expert” I fail
Leap 15 is a superb distro with a single defect - the kernel version 4.12 that is aligned with SLE 12.
The developers of Leap forget the fact, that in the past openSUSE used to be a desktop-centric. And this means - latest hardware support. If developers ignore this fact, they will start to lose desktop clients. I doubt the rise of server clients will compensate the quit of desktop users. Why do not provide functionality and options to easily add latest kernels? With the 4.12 LTS release for Leap 15 users with 8th Intel and 2nd Ryzen CPU generations are already discriminated. Who would agree to use obsolete kernels not providing support for their latest client hardware to the maximum? Tumbleweed is not the answer and it will never be for users relying on the stability of Leap. Please add an easy way for selection of kernel versions for desktop use in Leap.
