The Grand openSUSE Thread

General Chit Chat
41

Ok i tried again, the problem i was having was being used to ubuntu’s easy mode installer next->next->user name->next->next->next->location->next->next->done. then spend an hour in bash adding extra mount-poinst and other craziness i need to live with.

Opensuse’s will allow you to do anything during the install, even break shit, and will have a dialog page for it. I rushed through it the first time and just next->next->next->fail.jpg. So some of my earlier ranting was due to rage at losing my /home partition i was hoping to transfer without backing it up.

You restore 200gig of files manually from bd-r and not want to punch a kitten through an electric fan.

So i retracted all my previous rants except the random double screen-savers. that’s still “a bit bobbins”, im english so i can say that XD.

So sorry Bear454, i exploded at you! can i buy you a internet-beer? sorry man

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42

No worries @mbs . Instead of a virtual beer, how about you to file a bug on the double-screensaver thing at http://bugzilla.opensuse.org ?

43

I’d recommend ElementaryOS in that case.

44

As a lubuntu tester I found opensuse with lxde nice but wish it didn’t have to be netboot. I want an lxde iso because I don’t want to have to wait for everything to download and then forget my password to login.

zypper seems like a really good package manager and seems more intuitve than apt but I am used to apt.
The repositories seem to be decent as well. It has htop ncdu and some other stuff that put me off from trying centos.

One thing I miss from ubuntu is ssh-import-id which is nice for importing ssh keys to a vm.

Coming with a nice clipboard manager of parcelite. But I am having problems with it in ubuntu.

45

I also seem to like and which there was an iso with lxde on it.

46

I don’t think I understand “clipboard managers”. Why are they useful?

47

That’s…unusual. MS are pretty good at hardware, and hardware innovations (they invented the mouse wheel, I believe) and I’ve never had their stuff fail. Does it fail in other linux- based OSes too? Is it very very new?

48

I love clipboard managers.

Occasionally I copy and paste something, only hours later to wish I could paste that same item again (perhaps a command, some snippet of text or a URL). A selectable history of what you’ve copied and the ability to re-paste it without having to find the original source is tremendously handy.

Granted, there may be multiple days in a row where I don’t use the functionality at all, but it’s really nice when you need it, and typically clipboard managers are fairly light on resources. Clipman on Xfce is a favorite.

49

Yeah they remember what you copied. I find if you use on a youtube video and copy the video at the current time you can go back where you left off.

50

A few of the reasons:

  1. Copying a username and password from a password manager without having to do a open password manager → copy → back to page → paste → back to password manager → copy → back to page → paste loop.
  2. Often times, I’ll be writing something for work where I want to include a lot of links, I’ll just jump onto the browser and click copy lots of times, and be able to access those with a keyboard shortcut.

Just two reasons, but they are a symptom of the higher level reason of having “history of things you copied”. No longer will you go to paste something somewhere and realise that you copied over the thing you had meant to copy. This is a simple sliding window of N (configurable obviously) copied items which are easily accessible through a keyboard shortcut.

51

OK. That one seems like something mildly useful; at the moment I’d do “ctrl-c, alt-tab switch to sublime, ctrl-v, alt-tab back”, and a clipboard manager would help there. Historically, desktop environments have been anti-clipboard-manager because there a whole bunch of corner cases that aren’t well handled, to do with clipboard formats. The way X clipboards work historically is that I copy text in, say, LibreOffice Writer, which does little to nothing; I paste it into, say, Chrome, and Chrome then talks to LO to say “I want the data in one of these formats: html, rtf, plain text” and LO provides it in the best format it knows about. With a clipboard manager involved, the manager has to ask LO for the data in all formats in order that it can provide that data to Chrome later when Chrome asks. Has this sort of thing been resolved?

52

Afraid I have to give the cop out answer of “I don’t know”. I would venture towards saying Yes based on the fact that I haven’t had any issues related to that. I use parcellite, and generally the things I copy, appear as I would expect when I paste them.

One more thing that I find marginally useful with them, is that they give you a nice binary to pipe text to, to copy something to terminal. i.e

echo "This is for my clipboard" | parcellite

And you get it on your clipboard.

53

The mouse is an original microsoft sidewinder, so definitly not new. Next to that I don’t think there is a distro with which I didn’t have this problem at one time or the other. In most cases it works perfectly fine at the installation, but when I do the first update it just magically appears. There have been times that it dissapeared spontaniously after an update months later, but if hat happend it just tendeded to reapear as spontanious. The actual problem with my mouse is that it takes about 5 minutes to activated after booting. If I press any button during this time, the lights of the mouse turn on and stay on. Somehow I have the feeling that grub2 might have an influence, although I am not sure how and why that feeling is there…

54

I played with making my own image with SUSE studio… Never quite worked out the way I wanted…

I’m back to my wonderful UbuntuMATE

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55

The installer is very slick and professional. I think it would be reassuring to windows emigres and corporate IT-types. The user interface is not all that different from upstream KDE or GNOME (notwithstanding YAST, a tool about which my feelings mirror those of the hosts pretty closely). Software discovery is OK but not amazingly great. But if your need for new and shiny software is modest, like it is for me at work, you should have no problem.
EB

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56

Well I gave openSUSE a shot.

Honestly it was more coincidental than anything. I needed to install a linux and all I had was a tiny pathetic USB flash disk from the last millennium.

Obviously the main install CD was far too large to even attempt, so I ended up going with the netinstall. Didn’t boot with a load of udev errors, couldn’t fix it with any of the suggested boot flags, gave up pretty quick.

I went around the usual other distributions looking for a small install I could use. The ubuntu alternate CD seems to have exponentially grown and hidden itself on some wiki page, also there was no iso for the most beta of the upcoming release and I’d have rather gone with that. Fedora seem to have dismissed the idea anyone would have any issues with a multi gig install medium and I couldn’t find any solution there.

Anyway I ended up back at openSUSE netinstall, however tumbleweed this time. For whatever reason tumbleweed worked basically fine (except when I messed it up later the installer would get stuck at 75% when scanning the drives when openSUSE was already installed, which could only be fixed by formatting the install from outside the installer)

The openSUSE installer is absolutely fucking beautiful. It honestly blew me away. I found it as easy and functional (or more so) than the ubuntu installer, however unlike the latter it somehow managed to give me loads of great options, just slightly off the beaten track - in an obviously placed advanced menu or a dropdown - without being remotely intimidating to a new user. The suggested format wasn’t what I wanted so it came up with another list of alternatives, of which one was correct. I had a look at the manual formatting as well and it all seemed great.

Also for Langridge, I set my country to UK and it set the keyboard to UK without any issue. I was tempted to install enlightenment to see if you were wrong about that too but I went with gnome in the end.

I’m sort of interested as to why openSUSE goes for btrfs for root by default and XFS for home. I honestly forgot XFS even existed and searching for it generally comes up with complaints and slander rather than any compliments. As for btrfs, every time I had to plugpull my computer, from later issues, I ended up having to do a btrfs check --repair from an external linux to get it to boot again. That said snapshots are a really cool feature and I cannot wait to be able to use them without these other disadvantages.

The default openSUSE gnome desktop was really nice. I have always really hated gnome3 but considering the reaction of some of the bad voltage presenters to being pleasantly suprised by gnome3 - I decided to try it.

I’ve always seen where gnome3 has been headed but when I first tried it - it was just so far away from completing the experience it set out for. With openSUSE and gnome 3.16, it was a lot damn closer than I remember. I was perfectly content with gnome for several days. I found YaST helped cover a lot of the bases gnome3 really fails at.

Eventually though I had to give up on gnome, due to the same complaint I have always had with gnome3 - give me some god damn options. Gnome’s attitude on this is absolutely fucking annoying as hell. I understand that they want to make a nice easy desktop for even complete newbies, commendations there. However they completely exacerbate the usability issues in Linux by removing all the “complicated” gui options. Well fucking great so to do anything, even from changing a key layout to getting rid of mouse acceleration I need to use a command line, congratulations, complete design failure imo. Even the GUI options on windows are far more extensive, even the Mac OS. If they amended this stupid attitude to options I think I could like gnome a lot but this terrible design decision frustrates me to hell.

Worth mentioning as its own topic, I felt YaST got a well undeserved pummelling in the review, its absolutely great - the highlight of the experience id say. Having good extensive options in a simple centralised location is a great boon to the complete lack of any options in gnome. Later when I was having X issues the revelation that you could load a completely featured YaST ncurses UI without a GUI was amazingly helpful. Even the random list of variables wasn’t something I disliked, I just used the search function with common sense terms and always got what I was looking for immediately. No lag issues, though I do have a gaming rig so even if it was super slow I probably wouldn’t experience it. YaST is an absolutely stellar feature beyond anything iv seen on any other linux distro or other OS.

Eventually I was forced to move away because of the nvidia drivers. It was clearly stated on the wiki that you would have to do a manual installation to get them to work on tumbleweed, and reinstall them every kernel update. Regardless of this being a stupid problem it wasn’t something I had an issue with. However the drivers just flat out refused to work for me no matter what I did.

After trying everything I said a fairly sad farewell to my opensuse desktop and threw arch over it, in which the nvidia drivers worked without issue.

Anyway to conclude, a lot of problems, plenty probably due to being forced to use tumbleweed though. Gnome 3 is a lot better than I remember but still unusable. YaST is fucking great. The installer is fucking great. Doubt I will use again but if someone could guarentee the bugs I experienced would not happen again I would probably recommend it to a new Linux convert.

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57

The installer is a YaST module too. :slight_smile:

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