Software selection during installion

English Install/Boot/Login
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Is there a way to select what packages/apps you want installed or not installed during installation?

There are numerous things I always told the installer to not install, and other non-default stuff to install during the setup process in pre-16 versions of opensuse/Leap, couldn’t see a way to do that in Leap 16

Something that surprised me is I wrote a script to remove what I didn’t want, install things I do want and make a few other changes, didn’t wanna do it all manually on every machine I install Leap 16 [Assuming I do put it on my others]

When I ran ‘sudo zypper up’ the following day it wanted to reinstall everything I’d previously uninstalled which I thought a bit odd, hasn’t done it since though

I’m not enthusiastic about the decision to remove Yast2 I must admit, it was such a convenient and handy tool for configuring stuff, I’m sure there were reasons for that decision but I can’t think what they might be, would’ve been nice to have the option to keep Yast if that were possible

I was able to get most of of the Yast modules I most use as seperate packages but it pulled in other modules and put everything as a seperate entry in the System category of the menu meaning I had to mess around with editing the menu to put everything into a submenu, I HATE cluttered menus

I do wonder if some sort of Yast replacement configuration tool might be implemented in the future, Yast was one of the reasons I’ve preferred opensuse to other distros for the best part of 20 years or so

Removing 32-bit support is a bit of nuisance to me as well, I have some old windows apps I’ve always ran in wine, music stuff like an app that analyses chords/keys etc of a song and one for creating and managing presets in a fairly old guitar multi-effects pedal I still use

The prospect of having to use another machine or distro just for those things is something of an annoyance for me

I’m probably gonna stick with 15.6 or Tumbleweed for a while on my other machines until I see where 16 ends up going, not finding 16 to be an improvement for me as it is right now, though it was only two days ago I installed it

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@nula Hi and welcome to the Forum :smile:
There is with Agama you can create profiles, similar to AutoYaST.

Look at installing Flatpak https://doc.opensuse.org/release-notes/x86_64/openSUSE/Leap/16.0/html/release-notes-leap-160/index.html#id-wine

I suggest a full read of the release notes to see other changes.

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are your unwanted apps part of the DE’s pattern? if you select for example gnome in the installer, then you get the full official experience (and those extra apps during updates), but you can also install headless and install the _basic pattern manually, which installs much fewer packages.

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Thanks for the welcome @malcomlewis

I’m not new to the forum though, just been a very long time since I’ve needed to use it, forgot my password and don’t have the email account I was originally registered under so had to create a new account

I have since read that you can run 32-bit apps under the flatpak version of wine so I’ll check that out later, I’ll also have a read up on Agama profiles, thanks for the tip

My first impression of the Leap 16 installer is it’s simpler than the old Yast one but with a bit less control, or that control is less easy to find, did start a hdd install a while back and found the partitioner pretty unwieldy to use compared to the old one, there were a couple of other anomalies that made me think this doesn’t very mature yet and decided to hold off on it

This install I’ve done a VM mainly to see how it’s come along since then, it has improved some, seems like it’d be great for people happy to just accept the defaults but that’s never really been me

In my main desktop machine that I use daily for example I have two SSDs and three HDDs, two OS installs that sync things like user directories, browser profiles and a few other things with each other, seems like it’d be easier for me to just set up the Leap 16 partitions during install and do the others manually post-install, on previous versions I could do it more quickly and simply during install than it seems I’ll be able to with Agama

Maybe I’ll just add a section to modify/add the mounts in fstab to my post-install script

Thanks for the advice @xm3t4l, that’s how I do Arch installs but I’m used to being able to install opensuse and it be 90% ready to go and to my liking once it boots into the system following installation, not being able to have the same thing in a new release seems like a bit of a backwards step

For example prior to 16 I could just go into the software selection and deselect patterns like kde-pim and kde-games and none of that stuff would install, can’t even just uninstall those patterns in 16 with zypper like you used to be able to, I had to uninstall each package within them individually

Same goes for installing packages I use that don’t come with the default install, once the system boots post-install the less I have to mess around with installing and uninstalling stuff the more I like it

Suppose I’m just an old guy who’s a creature of habit with more than a touch of OCD :grin:

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@nula I’m the same, have post install system and user scripts :wink:

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In Agama you can still select or deselect patterns. I recommend you use this for a minimalistic rough selection; like a bare minimum desktop so you can continue. Then do the installation with this minimalistic selection, log into your desktop and continue from there with zypper commands or with Myrlyn. If you use Myryln (which I recommend, of course), select some packages, then install them and go back to the selection screen.

Over many decades I learned the hard way that it’s not worthwhile to spend an hour selecting packages only to lose that work if anything goes wrong; either because of an error or because you get tangled up in dependency problems. Keep it simple.

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I just accept the default for GNOME, then post install depending on hardware install the bit’s and pieces I need, set capabilities on a few programs, install programs with zypper some get no-recommends added where applicable.