I came to linux as my primary OS in 2014 when I built my current PC and loaded it with Kubuntu 14.04. At the time, there was quite a lot of fiddling I had to do to get everything working properly, especially around graphics drivers. Needless to say, 2 years down the track I found openSUSE much easier. I believe this is mostly due to my hardware being better supported in the newer kernel 4.x but I have to give some credit to openSUSE for making the few configs I did have to do very easy.
Rather than wait for Kubuntu 16.04 I have jumped on to Leap 42.1.
I am interested to hear other people’s accounts of what (minimum) configs they had to do to their openSUSE install to get it fit-for-purpose.
Please post your hardware, primary purpose, and checklist of things you had to do to before you got to “work”.
My hardware (gaming machine and general use PC, built about 2 years ago, overclock to 4.3Ghz and CPU cooler are a recent upgrade):
**MOBO: Z87-D3HP
**CPU: i5-4690K @4.3Ghz (with a Noctua U12-S in push-pull configuration)
**RAM: 8GB DDR3
**GPU: MSI R9270X 4GB (will be attempting to OC this slightly soon)
**SSD: 1TB 840 EVO**********
Configs that I had to do:
1. First thing was getting my mouse working. Kernel support for my Mad Catz R.A.T.7 mouse is terrible, and none of the buttons work by default. I already knew what I was doing from my experience with Kubuntu though so went directly to xorg.conf.d folder and wrote up the config file for it. I did have to google for a template as I hadn’t kept the file I wrote on Kubuntu. First thing I noticed here was that openSUSE has quite a few config files in xorg.conf.d, whereas this folder is empty in Kubuntu.
2. Installed Chinese as a secondary language, and set up pinyin input. It was easy to add the language through Yast, and it installed all of the input methods I could have wanted by default, as well as both ibus and fcitx (something Kubuntu never did). All I had to do then was go to config in the keyboard icon in the bottom right of the screen and added Sunpinyin and Googlepinyin. I had to add both of these for either of them to register… I think this is just ibus silliness.
3. Install proprietary AMD drivers. I could not use 1-click install for this, as the script for 42.1 hasn’t been written yet, but the instructions were all right there on the page and I had the repo added and fglrx packages installed using Yast in 2 minutes. I ran aticonfig --initial afterwards like I am used to and it was done. I am really liking the SUSE approach to getting things done. *buntu seems to be very much the attitude that if you have any trouble whatsover, drop stright to the command line and copy-paste some commands - with no middle ground.
4. Install Steam (via 1-click install) and adding steam related rules to the firewall. I had a couple of issues with steam and this turned out to be the firewall. When I turned it off all my cloud saves started downloading so I added all the ports from steams documentation as exceptions and turned the firewall back on. I wasn’t used to having software firewall on by default, but it’s kind of nice to know it’s there.
And two very minor things:
> Set numlock default to “turn ON when KDE starts”, in the KDE settings
> Move the widget menu from top left to top right corner of the screen. I still have no idea why KDE defaults to the desktop folder view and the widget menu overlapping each other - but luckily it’s easily fixed by just dragging the widget menu out of the way.
After this I was good to go!
I was overall very impressed that I was able to fully configure this into a “work-ready” state without the usual googling, forum trawling, application bloat and cascading dependancies that normally happens in *buntu (at least in my experience).
