Should i try SUSE LEAP?

English Open Chat
#1

Good day People. having heard about LEAP i cant help but wonder if i should try it, im by no means a expert but neither am i a beginner.

What would be different about LEAP compared to standard SUSE
i imagine the Repositorys are rather limited still.

but it will be long term support correct?

i need someone to sell it to me. i wanna try but im being cautious!

#2

Under the hood, so to speak, LEAP uses ( a lot of ) SUSE’s code base, but not all of it. F.e. kernel, desktop environments are more recent. One could say LEAP is less conservative than SUSE.

i imagine the Repositorys are rather limited still.

At this moment, yes. After release you’ll see ( approx.) the same repos available as there are for 13.1, 13.2 etc. Currently the last fixes are added to LEAP, last tests in openQA are running. As soon as that’s finished the OBS will start building the packages in the other repos. (Not completely accurate, this line, but it covers the idea ).

but it will be long term support correct?

Yes. At least 3 years, since LEAP will be following SUSE’s release schedule.

i need someone to sell it to me. i wanna try but im being cautious!

In general the openSUSE community is quite modest. Why would we try to sell it to you? We don’t know anything about your needs/requirements. For what it’s worth: expect a rock stable release, like previous openSUSE releases have been.

#3

Leap is theoretically for the more cautious individual since the focus is more towards long standing stability than cutting edge. I’m planning on using Leap on my business laptop and upgrading my parent’s openSUSE 13.1 for that exact reason.

Feeling extra cautious? Wait a month before installing and/or try it in a virtualized environment like Virtualbox.

#4

I cannot decide for you. But I will be trying it.e

What would be different about LEAP compared to standard SUSE
i imagine the Repositorys are rather limited still.

We will know for sure, after some experience. Under the old scheme, 13.3 would have been about the same as current Tumbleweed. Leap is somewhat more conservative, so has older versions of some software. But not too much older.

Most of the software that I have been using is there. The two that I noticed in the milestones and in Beta1 were “ecryptfs” and “sendmail”. But “ecryptfs” showed up in RC1, and it appears that “sendmail” will be in the final release.

but it will be long term support correct?

Again, I’ll be waiting to see.

Under the old scheme, 13.3 would have been a whole new release from 13.2. With Leap, it looks as if 42.2 will be a significant update to 42.1, rather than a whole new release. So I may plan on an upgrade install instead of a clean install when 42.2 comes out.

i need someone to sell it to me.

I’m not a salesman.

My advice – wait for a week or two, and see how things shake out. The volume of posts at the forum will increase as people discuss issues with the new release (that always happens with new releases). Monitor them, and then make your decision.

#5

Missed that the first time: openSUSE is not SUSE, and Leap is not some SUSE product. openSUSE is community driven and is being developped on it’s own. Yes, it now shares some code with SUSE, but it’s not a SUSE derivate. Within openSUSE one could say that we now have Leap as an LTS, Tumbleweed as a rolling release.

#6

I have updated to leap and there are some good things as well as awful things:

Good things 1. It loads a little bit faster.
2. It is the first time I had suse update of my desktop without having do a clean install by formatting partitions.
3. I still had problems getting the internet to connect. ( neither good nor bad)

Bad things 1. Yast package manager is virtually useless. It is next to impossible to find a program you want to install.

If you want to go ahead, but be prepared to be frustrated and work on it to get working the way you want.

#7

It probably depends on what you are used to. I like Yast, and find it far superior to the ubuntu software manager.

#8

On Sat, 07 Nov 2015 02:36:01 +0000, reguspatoff wrote:

> Bad things 1. Yast package manager is virtually useless. It is next to
> impossible to find a program you want to install.

You should ask for help with it - my guess is that a combination of
having the right repos enabled and knowing where to look will make all
the difference in the world.

Jim

Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

#9

I love it. I tried openSUSE last year on my laptop, I liked YaST and other features, but I ran into hardware compatibility problems that I couldn’t solve, and thus went back to Linux Mint KDE. I installed Leap on Wednesday, and so far everything seems to be working great (on the same machine I had problems with before). KDE5 is awesome. It’s very likely I will stick with openSUSE as my distro of choice now.

#10

If you are familiar with an existing openSUSE, then LEAP is not too big a leap in terms of most things. If you have never used openSUSE or only used it a little, there could be a steep learning curve.

Took me 40 minutes to install a working system but another hour and twenty minutes to add all the programs I normally use - including TexLive which is over half a GB. All the programs I use are in the repos.

It isn’t as polished as most openSUSE releases - as has been reported elsewhere, there are some glitches like the ones you got with 10.1 and 10.2 and some minor features which I liked appear to have disappeared - but things work and there is nothing that says to me I made a mistake taking the leap!

#11

I did a clean install of Leap after using 13.2 for a long time. Unfortunately, Leap’s not quite ready for prime time – 90% of it works fine, but the other 10% is a real pain in the butt. Some examples of what’s happening on my machine:

  • I used full disk encryption in the installer and let openSUSE do the partitioning for me. On a 1 TB drive it assigned 10 GB to /, 80 GB to /home, 2 GB to swap… and left about 900 GB of the disk unused! So the first thing I had to do was resize all my partitions. This was all within the LVM/LUKS volume, so it was not leaving space for other OSes.
  • Keyboard completely dies (not even magic SysRq keys work) after resuming from suspending to RAM about half the time. Only solution is a hard power off.
  • One or more desktops die – they go black, lose their panels, right clicking does nothing. No idea how to fix this.
  • Large file copying operations can temporarily freeze the system.
  • Volume adjustment and mute keys don’t work for me (they did on 13.2).
  • Fonts rendering is intolerable. This is not at a subjective aesthetic level, but on an objective, the-rendering-is-so-bad-in-some-places-that-I-can-barely-read-the-text level. To be fair, this was the case with 13.2, too, and is the case of many other distros. I fixed this with Infinality and the version of libfreetype it comes with.
  • Leap doesn’t seem to be able to set my fan to more than a slow speed, so my CPU temps hover around 90º C (room temp ~ 18ºC). This is very worrisome. And it didn’t happen in 13.2.
  • Vertical panels are still poorly implemented. Most things simply can’t be configured to be reasonable (for example, I don’t need a 5cm x 5cm launcher icon, even if my panel is 5 cm wide!
  • Dolphin is missing things like the network location panel (I forget the exact name).
  • Trying to set desktop effects settings in the KDE control panel crashes it.
  • Kate isn’t installed by default. Huh? Easy to fix, but silly.

And so on…

I regret not waiting a couple months for 42.1.1 or whatever to come out.

#12

Definitely try Leap. This is by far the smoothest update I’ve ever experienced (I always do clean installs). Some points:

  • During install the partitioner proposed some idiotic btrfs nonsense with literally every directory mounted as a subvolume. Why? What problem does this solve.
  • That said, it did propose 150 MB for /boot/efi, 2 GB for swap, 40 GB for / and the rest for /home (480 GB ssd), so at least the sizes make sense.
  • Installed with LXDE option, and installed MATE as soon as it was booted.
  • Nvidia drivers for quadro k4200, dkms and kernel 4.3 compile all just worked
  • Virtual machines all migrated successfully from the XML. vfio passthrough of the secondary GPU worked just fine as well.
  • Fonts are fine, but I use MATE. KDE is unusable, and always has been.

The only real problem I ran into is one that always happens with updates: avidemux is broken in all versions newer than 2.5.4. It seemed to work, but doesn’t sync the audio when cutting out sections of video.

Definitely one of the most polished releases.

#13

They just share a common owner then.

openSUSE is community driven and is being developped on it’s own.

openSUSE Leap 42.1 is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise software, and maintenance will flow from SLE 12.x to Leap 42.x (and possibly vice-versa).

Yes, it now shares some code with SUSE, but it’s not a SUSE derivate.

How is that different from say Ubuntu being based on Debian?

Within openSUSE one could say that we now have Leap as an LTS, Tumbleweed as a rolling release.

One does say that Leap 42.x will have longer term support, at least 3 years, and Tumbleweed is definately a rolling release. :slight_smile:

#14

I was also going to recommend that the OP waited a couple of months, certainly before migrating everything to Leap. I also think it’s worth trying out sooner just to get a better feel for the timing. It can also depend on the preferred desktop’s status wrt to its upstream development cycle.

#15

The Yast package manager prior to Leap was informative, easy to use, easy to find and install packages ( if you had the proper repositories installed.) and it was far better than Ubuntu’s. No so now.

Why do some people have to fix something, when it’s not broke?

#16

On Sun, 08 Nov 2015 13:46:01 GMT
kdemello <kdemello@no-mx.forums.microfocus.com> wrote:

> Definitely one of the most polished releases.

Like most things, it depends what your system is and how you use it.
I’ve had more reliable experiences with most beta releases from
openSUSE. Problems are mostly if not all down to Plasma5; what I’ve
seen of Gnome looks OK.

(1) Yes, nVidia driver fixes (or rather gets around) graphics problems
associated with that type of card. But what happens when nVidia driver
gets buggy? It’s happened before so it’ll probably happen again. I
thought the 4.3.0 kernel had fixed nouveau but after three freezes in a
few hours, I’m not so sure that it’s entirely cured. I read that there
also problems with Intel but I haven’t been following that closely.

(2) If you rely on the “restore previous session” setting within
“session management”, you’ll possibly be disappointed. Most applications
now work but several don’t. Seems odd to me that manually saving a
session results in all applications being restored when using “restore
manually saved session”. If one works, why not the other?

(3) If you use tabs in Dolphin and want them carried over to a new
session, you need to use “restore manually saved session” as logging
out now raises the following warning, “You have multiple tabs open in
this window, are you sure you want to quit?” With KDE4, this only
applied when manually closing a window.

–
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 13.2 (64-bit); KDE 4.14.9; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Kernel: 4.3.0; Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (Driver: nouveau);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)

#17

On Sun, 08 Nov 2015 16:06:01 GMT
reguspatoff <reguspatoff@no-mx.forums.microfocus.com> wrote:

>
> The Yast package manager prior to Leap was informative, easy to use,
> easy to find and install packages ( if you had the proper repositories
> installed.) and it was far better than Ubuntu’s. No so now.

I think I must be missing something. Although I haven’t been able to
use Leap much, I haven’t seen any difference in YaST Software Manager.

>
> Why do some people have to fix something, when it’s not broke?
>

One of my old bosses said about twenty years ago that we should abide
by a new rule, “if it ain’t broke, break it!” I think there’s been a lot
of that going on with Plasma5 and it also happened with the KDE3 regrade
to KDE4. Myself, I prefer evolution to revolution.

–
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 13.2 (64-bit); KDE 4.14.9; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Kernel: 4.3.0; Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (Driver: nouveau);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)

#18

Trying Leap 42.1 in Virtual Box machine. Installed OK, but no sound. A lot of work to get sound audio but eventually installed and working. USUAL Install chromium and pepper to get bbc.co.uk videos in news to work (Firefox needs flash!). Appears to work for all other used programs in 13.2.

#19

How did you manage to work sound under VirtualBox?
I tried without success.:frowning:

#20

I am sorry, but as a decade-plus long SUSE / OpenSUSE user, I beg to disagree. Of all the desktop OS I have used in the last thirty years, which is basically every major Linux distro and a few Unix versions, plus having some passing familiarity with MS-DOS and Windows, I find Yast easily the superior software management tool. Are you sure you have familiarised yourself with how it works? Not that you need much, mind, just open YaST Control Center → Software Management → then type something in the search box and browse the results. Unless you have changed something major in the configuration such as removing the “Search” view, it should work very intuitively out of the box.

I suggest explaining your issues with YaST in more detail in order to receive some help/tips. Or you can always use zypper, also a fine tool.