Did you install V16 as an upgrade to an existing V15.6 system or begin from scratch? In my experience it’s never a good idea to install a new major release as an upgrade, but minor upgrades seem fine.
I’ve just installed V16 on a couple of laptops and I have to say the first attempt left me wondering whether OpenSuSE had become too “corporatised” and it was time to migrate to another distribution, maybe Mint. But I’m now glad to have persevered, and I’m happy to outline my installation procedure if anyone is interested. Firefox, Thunderbird, and Kmail are quite easy to migrate once you’ve worked out how, but it was certainly a learning experience for me. (Don’t use the Kmail backup tool for email data!)
V16 does seem easier to manage. But Packman is certainly a loss and the Discover utility doesn’t even come close; is it really intended to be a substitute? I wonder what’s behind some other changes too, and what evolutionary direction the OpenSuSE architects have in mind? I hope it’s not management by AI.
I’m glad to see that Inkscape, GCC Fortran 95, and Umbrello are still available too.
I note that V16 seems to have worked around a networking problem with many USB-C hubs, which would intermittently, or sometimes consistently, fail to start Ethernet properly. It would be nice to know how V16 supports Ethernet via a hub and what IETF protocols it supports? (I believe there are three, and another from Microsoft.)
I must try Xfce myself. I have the Plasma GUI set up as a dead spit of Windows '95 - it’s simple to do, but I like the integration and flexibility which Plasma offers.
I’ll say it once again: the DEs, WMs are not the issue. It’s the LXQT ( or whatever “lightweight” environment ) user that fires up 6 browser windows with a total of > 100 tabs open. No opinions needed there, anyone can see the numbers on their machines.
Well, here I am sat at my laptop after multiple fresh installations of Tumbleweed, running Gnome with XFCE as a backup. so far so good, hopefully I’ll be a little less frustrated by the Gnome environment?
I found it quite a challenge to install Tumbleweed, mainly to do with the root password request, I didn’t set one, weird if you ask me?
at one point I configured the network before installing from the usb, the number of warnings and a very unstable system after aborting and retrying to install, meant another fresh installation!
I got there in the end, though, so currentky looking like a Cheshire cat.
Thank you to whomever suggested this route, very pleased! to all others whom contributed what I consider to be sage advice, thank you as well. I’m not a complete Opensuse/Linux numpty so I can deal with many things through -help, but it good to get information from more experienced users in my mind!
So, at this point, I look for an answer for Xfce: I think I read in the notes that Xfce is still in Leap 16.0, but that it uses Wayland. But, then I think I saw a reference that X11 can still be added by the user if they want Xfce using it instead. Will this allow the use of lightdm? Would that be any advantage for some reasons?
… and, am I correct about the information I just gave?
I am a long time Xfce user, would like to keep it as much the same experience as possible.
Hey Gerry, good to see you here.
Is xfce-session installed? If so, then you should see the session in the displaymanager as a choice named “XFCE on X11” ( or something like that ). Choose it once, should be remembered.
I have not installed 16.0 yet, want to be sure I do it safely. Yes, I will clone the drive with Clonezilla for an emergency backup, as a person should always do first, but I don’t want to have to spend the many extra hours restoring from the backup if I can avoid it.
When I do install, I will then follow your instructions. Thank you, and it’s good to see you here (and so many other openSUSE friends), also.
beta_bruno@lt-b:~> zypper info --requires patterns-xfce-xfce
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Information for package patterns-xfce-xfce:
-------------------------------------------
Repository : repo-oss (16.0)
Name : patterns-xfce-xfce
Version : 20230212-lp160.8.1
Arch : x86_64
Vendor : openSUSE
Installed Size : 50 B
Installed : No
Status : not installed
Source package : patterns-xfce-20230212-lp160.8.1.src
Upstream URL : https://github.com/openSUSE/patterns
Summary : XFCE Desktop Environment
Description :
Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems.
Requires : [2]
pattern() = x11
pattern() = xfce_basis
beta_bruno@lt-b:~>
but apparently is not directly provided by the installer, so it should be available for an online upgrade or after a “generic desktop” install (but I did not try either myself).