LEAP-16.0 RC - post install user accounts menu without YaST

[oldcpu]

With a recent LEAP-16.0 RC install, I’ve been looking for aspects that I used to use in YaST, to obtain my own personal reaction to the easy to find YaST modules not being available, and I have posted already a few times on this subject.

I’ve come to realize, that I do not use YaST as much as I originally thought, and further, I realize that for of MY USE (which is likely very different from many), I simply do not use YaST all that much, albeit let me qualify that by saying some YaST aspects were absolutely critical to me, like :

• software & repository management
• printer configuration
• scanner configuration
• network configuration

User accounts/menu

This openchat post is about user accounts, and the short / executive summary here, is LEAP-16.0 (via cockpit) handles this nicely as an alternative to YaST in my opinion.

Details

A bit more detail on my summary above.

As a refresher, here are some old YaST menus (taken from my laptop):

.

I looked at the KDE menu for users, and frankly, its pretty basic, and IMHO not much of a YaST alternative:

KDE menu

Again - the KDE menu is IMHO not much of an alternative to YaST here.

So I launched Cockpit (see above post for details) in a browser with:

http://localhost:9090

…and I thought Cockpit menus in this subject area pretty good. A couple of menus:

Cockpit (example: users)

Cockpit (example: user oldcpu)

I am a bit puzzled by this thou by my own setup in LEAP-16.0 RC. I don’t recall asking for user ‘oldcpu’ to be flagged as an administrator during the LEAP-16.0 install, but user oldcpu was flagged as such. That was not my intention during the LEAP-16.0 RC install. Maybe that is the default way of doing things now?

So I need to go back and read up on this to understand better what I did during the install.

I plan to do fresh install for the final version of LEAP-16.0.

[knurpht]

@oldcpu

I am a bit puzzled by this thou by my own setup in LEAP-16.0 RC. I don’t recall asking for user ‘oldcpu’ to be flagged as an administrator during the LEAP-16.0 install, but user oldcpu was flagged as such.

This is a change that happened in TW ~2 years ago IIRC. The first created user gets username:username for user:group instead of username:users. Apparently this change has now landed in Leap 16. A thing probably required when restoring user backups ( I always backup the entire ~/ ) will be a chown username:username /home/username -R.

[deano_ferrari]

@oldcpu

albeit let me qualify that by saying some YaST aspects were absolutely critical to me, like :

• software & repository management
• printer configuration
• scanner configuration
• network configuration

I know not the focus of this topic, but I feel I need to respond to your comments here - I hope you’ve now seen that YaST isn’t really required (= not critical) for the things you listed above. (Many new users won’t even know what it did or didn’t do.)

[oldcpu]

@deano_ferrari

I know not the focus of this topic, but I feel I need to respond to your comments here - I hope you’ve now seen that YaST isn’t really required for the things you listed above. (Many new users won’t even know what it did or didn’t do.)

Yes - absolutely.

YaST was like an old crutch or walking stick that mostly still functioned (albeit falling apart in pieces and no longer as nice nor in places as functional as it was when once new) that one was very very fond of, with very strong emotional attachment - and difficult to dispose of < until the wife kicked one and forced one to buy a new walking stick ) > .

[deano_ferrari]

@oldcpu

I am a bit puzzled by this thou by my own setup in LEAP-16.0 RC. I don’t recall asking for user ‘oldcpu’ to be flagged as an administrator during the LEAP-16.0 install, but user oldcpu was flagged as such. That was not my intention during the LEAP-16.0 RC install. Maybe that is the default way of doing things now?

I suspect tied to the sudo-policy-wheel-auth-self package as mentioned here when installing…

Leap 16 Alpha Installation Problems

Yes, those are packages that it is recommending that you choose in the Software selection step. “openSUSE-repos-Leap” is for the definitions for openSUSE repository management via zypp-services. The “sudo-policy-wheel-auth-self” package is for the “sudo authentication policy that allows users in the wheel group to authenticate as root with their own password”. … more info on that here: Sudo announcement - upcoming changes - openSUSE Factory - openSUSE Mailing Lists And as a matter of fact, …

[deano_ferrari]

This makes sense for the primary user IMO. Given that Myrlyn and Cockpit are polkit-aware, it allows “trusted” users to authenticate using their own credentials, providing added convenience for things that require administrative privileges.