openSUSE

The European Commission sees open-source software as more than an IT tool. Policy makers are encouraging open-source ecosystems to drive innovation, autonomy and collaboration in a world where global trade is being redrawn.

This trade dispute highlights something most open-source advocates have known for years: open source is freedom. It’s freedom from monopolies, freedom from arbitrary pricing, and freedom from foreign influence.

I prefer LTS releases usually so Tumbleweed doesn’t suit me. Slowroll sounds doable but I see it’s still experimental. Is it as reliable as Tumbleweed?

I recently move to openSUSE from Ubuntu, because I simply felt a bit awkward with Canonical. Now you could say there is SUSE behind openSUSE as well, and the world is not perfect. That is true, but I really do not like the fact that Canonical would receive any of my data, as irrelevant as it might seem. I also rather happily pay for a product than unintentionally share data with a corporation. Now that said, Ubuntu is still a great OS and you can turn off telemetry and as a pragmatic computer user I have nothing against snaps.

Still there were some minor points that added to the aforementioned awkward feeling and made me switch: 1.) An annoying dysfunctional bluetooth connection to my headphones 2.) An extremely short battery life on my Thinkpad 3.) General performance felt not as good

Now coming to openSUSE. I knew the distro from years ago and thought I give it another try. And I was not disappointed. After some years of rudimentary Linux experience (mostly Ubuntu and Linux Mint) I can even appreciate openSUSE more than ever.

There are certainly a lot of soft facts that let you choose openSUSE:

• It is easy to install, still leaves you room to play around with stuff.
• It has a pretty stable KDE integration (which leads to a great DE experience)
• It has a good community behind it
• It is mostly based out of central europe (#dataprivacy)
• Rollbacks are just great and already saved my ass

I am not sure whether I would recommend it for newbies altogether, despite it being really stable, it still has the look and feel of a distro for an intermediary skillset. This is mostly because of the look and feel of the installer and YaST. Maybe it has to do with the fact that you certainly would need to use the console from time to time. But then again, at least Tumbleweed is advertised as such a distro. Hence, no one can really complain about these things.

I am using IntelliJ and Podman a lot, the experience under Ubuntu was a bit better, as it really just worked out of the box (with snaps). For openSUSE it took some tweaks so that everything works (out of Flatpaks). Might be an unfair comparison, but being productive easily is still a good measure. Using IntelliJ wo Flatpak was an annoyance, so therefore I have chosen the Flatpak path ;)

But putting in a little effort to make the IntelliJ stuff work was worth it since the overall performance is MUCH better. Of course it could be due to different DE, but it still just feels great to work on openSUSE. And indeed battery life is much, much better. I did not do any measurements, but I would say we are talking at least about 30% improvement (and yes I had TLP installed on Ubuntu).

Additionally, Bluetooth worked flawlessly (like everything else I was doing so far).

There was one little bug though with my background in the lock screen that somehow did magically change for a while.

Gaming with Steam also works easily, although you might need to change codecs for headphones in order to hear stuff. But I had a similar problem under Ubuntu.

As usual differences in distros sometimes are marginal, at least for the non-Linux nerd-faction, so for me its really the mixture of the philosophy behind, the performance, how easy I can do and understand things.

Overall, great experience with openSUSE. I can recommend. Would be great to hear responses to my experience.

I'm currently using the Flatpak ProtonVPN client, and every time I try to connect to or disconnect from one of the over 10,000 servers, there's an authentication prompt asking for the root password. The message is: “System policy prevents modification of network settings for all users”.

Polkit is a bit mind-bending, but after chasing many an out-of-date wild goose down a maze of distro rabbit holes I found a fairly simple solution on the Arch Wiki.

Add to the wheel group any users who should be allowed to make changes to network manager, then create a polkit rules file called
"10-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.rules" in
/etc/polkit-1/rules.d/ and add the following:

/* Allow users in wheel group to modify NetworkManager without authentication */
polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
    if (action.id == "org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.settings.modify.system" &&
        subject.isInGroup("wheel")) {
        return polkit.Result.YES;
    }
});

Reboot for the new rules to become effective and you should be done.

I'll leave this here for anyone searching for the same symptoms. Leave a comment if you have a better method to get polkit to shut up.

Edit: You don't have to use the wheel group, it can be any group that your vpn-using user is in. I had already added myself to the wheel group so I used that.

I have lots of trouble with my Sony XM1000XM4 headphones since the Plasma 6 update. I'm pretty sure the pipewire was updated to version 2 at the same time I pulled the KDE upgrade.

At first the issues were manageable, but annoying: If I switched from listening to music to headset mode to take a call in Google Meet, the microphone didn't work. If I switched to headphone mode and then back again to headset mode, the microphone worked again. I could continue using bluetooth with this workaround.

Recently, the situation has got much worse - I can't get the microphone to work at all, and the sound will also stop working randomly. My workaround now is to connect my headphones to the audio out of my laptop.

I've checked pipewire logs and the only things I saw were xrun warnings, which I don't believe would break everything completely.

Does anyone have similar issues or debugging tips? I've tried Googling/Duck Duck Going this for months, and I've not found anyone with similar symptoms.

So I was using Tumbleweed on my old laptop but I got kind of sick of all the updates; I felt like that icon showing I had updates available just had a permanent space on my screen. Every time I refreshed I had at least 200mb of updates to do. So when I got my new laptop I went with Leap instead.

But what’s the actual difference? So the OS only gets updated once a year or so does it? Are smaller releases more forthcoming? What if there’s other packages that get updated? Do I have to wait a year to get the latest version or are they updated more regularly? I’m wondering if I should look at Slowroll as I don’t want to be waiting a year for new features.