I am having openSUSE-13.2 installed on my Dell Inspiron 15 with Intel CORE i5. I have been using openSUSE for quite sometime now. But never had this problem earlier.
The Problem:
If I wiash to install a new Application, say ‘MPLayer’ and after selecting the same I click ‘Accept’ then on the ‘Changed Package’ dialogue I select the menue ‘Selected by the user’ and ‘Continue’, it start downloading all irrelevant softwares also. An example is that for installing ‘MPlayer’ it started downloading ‘gnucash-docs (48.41 MB)’. Like that the list of downloads showed 292 packages. Surely, all those packages could not be needed for ‘MPlayer’.
It unnecessarily overloads the system with other unwanted package.
When you install something, Yast will want to install all recommended applications for the installed patterns, such as those recommended for the Office patterns, if you do not have all the recommended applications installed.
The answer, if you do not want those recommended applications, is to go to Yast=>Software Management
In the menu under Options, select Ignore Recommended Packages for Already Installed Packages
The first time that you install something, lots of stuff that would not fit on the install media is also installed.
If you had used the NET installer, so that you were installing directly from the repos, these would have been included in your original install.
Personally, I like this install behavior. Disk sizes are large enough that there is plenty of room for them. But you can use options in Yast Software Management to turn off the automatic install of recommended packages.