I’ve been on openSUSE Tumbleweed for quite a while now, and honestly one of the biggest reasons I stick with it is YaST. It’s always felt like such a powerful yet simple tool for managing the system, and I’ve really come to rely on it.
With Leap 16.0 dropping YaST and the talk about moving towards Agama and Cockpit, Myrlyn, I’ve got to admit I’m a bit worried — YaST has always been such a core part of the openSUSE experience for me.
I’m curious how others feel about this shift:
Do you feel the same sense of loss if YaST goes away?
Are there certain YaST features you think will be hard to replace?
Has anyone here already moved over to Agama, Cockpit, Myrlyn, and how’s it been?
Do you think the new tools will actually give a better experience once we get used to them?
It’s been awhile since I used YaST in earnest, been using Cockpit for awhile now as I can connect to all my systems on the local Lan without having to install anything as I use the Flatpak version. Sure there are a few things missing, but I’m also comfortable from the command line to perform tasks. AFAIK there will still be some ncurses module versions around.
I would say that YAST2 is too old to find candidates to keep it alive. It’s a technology of the past with an approach that has had its day.
The choice of Ruby now seems questionable, as it is no longer as popular as it was when it was chosen. This makes it more difficult to find maintainers.
For my part, I didn’t understand why Ruby was preferred over Python.
As for Myrlyn, you can install and use it immediately on Tumbleweed and Slowroll; it’s a drop-in replacement for the “YaST Software” module. You don’t even need to uninstall YaST to use it.
It can do all package and patterns operations that YaST could do and more (zypper up and zypper dup equivalent), and also the common repo operations (add, edit, remove), including community repos like PackMan, NVidia etc.; just try it.
Because, you know the difference between YaST and Myrlyn? Myrlyn is only a replacement for the YaST Software module (one of ~150 modules)…not for YaST itself…
It doesn’t want to be; it’s strictly only about the package management part, which was always largely a separate component. Naming it YaST3 would raise expectations that all the other YaST2 modules would be added in the future, and, worse, that there would also be an NCurses (text-based) user interface. None of that is going to happen; I explained that at length in the original documentation and also at the hack week project.
Myrlyn is following the Linux/Unix principle: Do one thing, and be good at it; don’t try to cover a whole range of tasks. Trying to be everybody’s darling doing everything never worked in the past.
Along with hui’s response about Myrlyn’s purpose, Cockpit, and its growing list of plugins, provides a modern, web-based alternative to YaST for managing (local and remote) systems. Its architecture makes it highly extensible, and suitable for supporting multiple Linux distros.
Presumably you are referring to Myrlyn Package Manager. To my experience most users prefer clicking on an inline link instead of searching for it.
I rarely use GUI applications for maintaining systems. However I always wanted to browse available resources with a performant lightweight application such as User Mode Myrlyn.
Hello everyone,
So as a new user 3 months now.
I noticed that Myrlyn was installed through the updates ,will the same be applied for Agama and Cockpit or we have to handle the transition by ourselves?
The only thing that I used YaST was to decrease grub2 menu time to 2s instead of 8.
without any problem.
I have never used YAST except, iirc, back in the day I think that’s how you installed software (though I could be misremembering).
TL;DR I’ve recently built a new computer (ASRock X870 Steel Legend WiFi) and I’ve been bouncing around trying to find a really good, X870 chipset-supporting kernel/distro combo. Anyhow, I saw Myrlyn and was wondering what it was.
