Leaping in a new direction with openSUSE 42.1



The openSUSE project has been talking for a while now about their new edition, called openSUSE Leap. The new edition of openSUSE is intended to provide a more stable core while still offering users cutting edge desktop software. The project's release announcement for openSUSE 42.1 explains: Version 42.1 is the first version of openSUSE Leap that uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) providing a level of stability that will prove to be unmatched by other Linux distributions. Bonding community development and enterprise reliability provides more cohesion for the project and its contributor's maintenance updates. openSUSE Leap will benefit from the enterprise maintenance effort and will have some of the same packages and updates as SLE, which is different from previous openSUSE versions that created separate maintenance streams. Community developers provide an equal level of contribution to Leap and upstream projects to the release, which bridges a gap between matured packages and newer packages found in openSUSE's other distribution, Tumbleweed. The new release provides users with KDE's Plasma 5.4 desktop as well as GNOME 3.16 and MATE 1.10 (along with various other desktop environments I will touch on later). Unlike previous releases of openSUSE, there is no live disc for 42.1. Our download choices include a 4.3GB installation DVD and a 85MB net-install CD. I decided to download the full sized DVD image. Booting from the openSUSE 42.1 media brings up a menu giving us the option of installing the distribution, upgrading an existing copy of openSUSE, starting a rescue session or checking the integrity of the media. I would be curious to see how well the upgrade feature works coming from a pre-Leap version of openSUSE, but I unfortunately did not have the time to explore that option this week. Instead I dived straight into the installation process.



The distribution uses a graphical system installer which begins by asking us to select our preferred language and our keyboard's layout. This screen also shows us licensing information for openSUSE and we can access a local copy of the project's release notes. We are next asked if we would like to enable on-line software repositories and/or access additional local media in order to install extra software during the set up process. By default, openSUSE's installer suggests it can automatically partition our hard drive with a Btrfs volume and some swap space. Alternatively, we can manually partition the disk. The disk partitioning screen has a lot of options and may be intimidating to new users, but I feel the utility is well organized and I found the individual screens easy to navigate. The installer supports working with file systems such as ext2/3/4 and XFS as well as Btrfs. After we divide up our disk the installer asks us to select our time zone from a map of the world. We are then asked which desktop environment we would like to have installed. While openSUSE defaults to KDE, other options include GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, Enlightenment, a plain X session or text-mode only with no desktop software. The following screen gets us to create a user account. Finally, we are shown a summary of the actions openSUSE's installer will take. Each action and setting listed in the summary has a hyperlink next to it, allowing us to configure or adjust the setting. For instance, we can choose which background services to enable, change the location of the boot loader and select which software will be installed. Once we confirm the settings are correct, the installer copies its files to our hard drive and reboots the computer.



I quite like openSUSE's system installer. I found it worked very quickly, the screens are responsive and while we could get through the installer by mostly clicking "Next" a handful of times, there is a great deal of customization which can be done. I like that the distribution makes things simple for us while providing easy access to more advanced configuration options.



When the computer boots, the openSUSE boot menu gives us the option of either loading the distribution normally, or accessing and booting one of the distribution's past snapshots. I will talk a bit about file system snapshots later, but for now it is worth noting that each time we change the operating system's configuration or install new software updates, openSUSE takes a snapshot of its file system (assuming we run the operating system on a Btrfs volume). When the system boots we can decide which snapshot to load, allowing us to roll back to a configuration we know to be good. This may be my favourite feature of openSUSE as it makes the operating system virtually bullet proof to any upgrade or configuration flaws and a reboot can fix just about anything short of hardware failure.



The openSUSE distribution boots to a graphical login screen where we can choose to sign into KDE's Plasma desktop or into the Ice window manager (IceWM). I tried the IceWM session and it is pretty minimal, but the session does provide the bare bones components of a traditional desktop layout. This session could be useful for running openSUSE on low-end machines or for recovering the system in the case Plasma breaks. After confirming the IceWM session worked, I spent all of my remaining time with Plasma 5. Plasma is presented with the application menu, task switcher and system tray placed at the bottom of the screen. On the desktop we find icons for opening the file manager. The Plasma desktop defaults to using a classic tree-style application menu, a feature I appreciate as I find navigating categories with mouse movements a smoother experience than typing searches or clicking on categories of software to bring up new menu pages. Plasma worked well for me and was responsive to input and I like the fairly minimal/classic desktop style the openSUSE team has chosen.



I tried running openSUSE in two test environments, a physical desktop computer and a VirtualBox virtual machine. The operating system performed well in both environments. The distribution properly detected all my hardware and set my display to its maximum resolution. In the virtual environment, openSUSE automatically integrated with VirtualBox and allowed the guest operating system to use my display's full resolution. When going through the system installer, I generally took the defaults and this resulted in a large installation, requiring about 5.6GB of disk space. However, openSUSE used notably less RAM than some of the other distributions I have tried recently, requiring around 350MB-400MB of RAM when sitting at the Plasma desktop. I suspect the wide range of memory usage arises from some of my measurements being taken while the system was checking for software updates and other measurements being taken after checks for updates were completed.





openSUSE 42.1 -- KDE System Settings

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Speaking of updates, when openSUSE detects there are software updates available in the distribution's repositories, a notification appears in our system tray. Clicking the update icon brings up a desktop widget that lists the available updates. We can click a button to install the waiting items. I was presented with only a few updates at the beginning of my trial (their total size unknown) and these were all installed cleanly from the update widget. Toward the end of the week the update widget found new packages, but would not install them and no error was given. Going into the distribution's update application I found a new package was required as a dependency to a pending upgrade. The update manager correctly handled the dependency and installed the waiting security updates. Hopefully, in the future, the update widget will handle this situation automatically.



Early in my trail with openSUSE I went into KDE's System Settings panel to make minor adjustments to the look and feel of the desktop. The System Settings panel offers users a great number of options to customize the desktop environment. Given the large number of options, I am happy to report there is a search feature to help us narrow down the exact module we need to access to change a setting. The System Settings panel includes a module for adding new printers to the system and I found this module did not work for me. The module appears to detect printers on the network, but even after providing the administrator's password, I was unable to add the detected printers to openSUSE as the button for adding a located printer was disabled. This led me to select another module in the System Settings panel which launches openSUSE's YaST control panel.





openSUSE 42.1 -- The YaST control panel

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The YaST control panel is one of the better features openSUSE offers. YaST provides a central location for system administrators to configure virtually every aspect of the operating system. YaST offers us easy to navigate, graphical modules for working with everything from software packages to printers, adjusting the system clock to joining a Windows domain, configuring the network to setting up a firewall, creating user accounts to managing file system snapshots and configuring sudo to enabling/disabling background services. There is a huge amount of flexibility to be had through YaST and I appreciate how quickly the modules load and how easy they generally are to navigate. One of YaST's modules deals with printers and I wanted to see if I would have better luck with YaST's printer utility than I had with Plasma's. As it turned out I did, but YaST was not able to locate and add a printer on its own, I had to provide the printer's full address (URI) in order for YaST to add it to the system. This is in contrast to my recent trials with Fedora and Ubuntu, both of which automatically scanned the network, found the printer and added it for me.



Aside from the printer module, there are a few other specific YaST modules I would like to touch on, including the package manager and the repository manager. The repository manager makes it easy to locate and enable additional repositories. The YaST repository manager is aware of several community repositories which can be added to the distribution with a couple of clicks. We can also manually add new repositories if we know their addresses. Community repositories are important for openSUSE users because the main repositories do not feature non-free items or popular video codecs. Fortunately, the repository manager lists not only the names of community repositories, but also offers a brief description of each repository, making it easier to find what we need.





openSUSE 42.1 -- Managing software packages

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Also on the topic of packages, the YaST software manager module worked well for me. The software manager offers us a lot of options, bordering on too many, I think. However, the basic functionality of searching for packages by name or by category work. For better or worse, the openSUSE software manager offers us several different ways to view package information and we can organize searches a number of different ways. The default method is to search for packages by name, but we can change the view to show us a tree of software categories or arrange software in various other ways. I think the software manager might be overwhelming for new users with its many options, but it does work quickly and I encountered no problems while using it. openSUSE also ships with the zypper command line package manager and it worked very well for me. The zypper utility uses a clear syntax, similar to dnf on Fedora or pkg on FreeBSD, while providing the speed of APT on the Debian family of distributions. I enjoyed using zypper as I feel it provides the best balance of performance, simple syntax and clear output of all the Linux command line package managers.



The final YaST module which stood out was Snapper. The Snapper module provides us with a way to view file system snapshots when the distribution is running on a Btrfs volume. Using Snapper, we can see a list of snapshots, see the changes that happened between each snapshot and restore files (or roll back files) from snapshots. Snapper is quite a flexible tool and it allows us to quickly browse changes to the file system, organized by directory. The YaST module appears to be a front-end for the snapper command line utility which provides similar functionality along with some extra, low-level features. By default, openSUSE creates a new snapshot of the operating system every time we make a configuration change or install package upgrades. Using Snapper, along with snapshot access from the boot menu, we can quickly roll back any harmful changes that have been made to the operating system.





openSUSE 42.1 -- Browsing file system snapshots with Snapper

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Apart from its many powerful system administrative tools, openSUSE ships with lots of useful software. Digging through the application menu we find the Firefox web browser, the Choqok micro-blogging software, the KMail e-mail client and the Konqueror web browser. The Konversation IRC client and the Kopete messaging software are also included along with the KTorrent bittorrent software. LibreOffice is installed for us along with the Okular document viewer and the KOrganizer personal organizer. The Amarok music player, KsCD audio CD player and Dragon Player are available along with the K3b disc burning software. We can also find copies of the GNU Image Manipulation Program, the digiKam camera manager and the Gwenview image viewer. There are a few small games included in the distribution's application menu along with the Marble virtual globe. I found the Ark archive manager, the Dolphin file manager, the KGet download manager and a remote desktop viewer included too. The system ships with two hardware information viewers, one in the YaST control centre and the stand-alone KInfoCentre. The former, I found, will save the details of our hardware to a text file which can be useful when submitting bug reports. openSUSE ships with a calculator, a text editor, the KGpg security key manager and a screen magnifier. Java is installed on the system for us. In the background we find systemd 210 and version 4.2.12 of the Linux kernel.



By default there is no compiler, no Flash plug-in and no support for playing popular video formats. I was able to play mp3 audio files out of the box, but to play video files I had to install codecs from openSUSE's community repositories. Adobe's Flash plug-in is also available in the repositories and worked well for me.





openSUSE 42.1 -- The YaST control panel

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Conclusions



openSUSE 42.1 is one of the more technically impressive and (to me at least) visually appealing distributions I have used so far this year. The distribution is easy to set up while offering a great deal of flexibility if we want to dig through the system installer's options. The desktop is responsive and easy to navigate and the distribution worked well with my hardware and integrated smoothly with VirtualBox. The YaST control centre is one of the most powerful and extensive configuration panels in the open source community and it makes tweaking the underlying operating system pleasantly easy.



While openSUSE does not have the range of software in its repositories some other mainstream distributions do, the community repositories are easy to add and make up for most of the missing open source packages.



So far as I know, openSUSE is still the only big name Linux distribution to fully embrace the advanced features of Btrfs, making it easy to create file system snapshots and roll back changes to the operating system or data files. Early on I noticed openSUSE was automatically cleaning up old snapshots, which means Btrfs will not eat up a lot of disk space. If we want to, we can adjust the number of snapshots openSUSE keeps, allowing us to revert to even older versions of files.



It took a little more work than usual to get a network printer set up on openSUSE, but otherwise everything on the distribution worked well. I was worried some components on the system would be dated, given that openSUSE 42.1 is partially based on SUSE Linux Enterprise. Such was not the case though. openSUSE's kernel, desktop software and end-user applications were all fairly modern and pleasantly stable. In short, openSUSE offered me one of the best, easiest and more flexible experiences I have had with a Linux distribution this year and I very much enjoyed my time with the operating system.



Given that I have reviewed two other mainstream projects, Fedora and Ubuntu, in recent weeks, I would like to take a moment to quickly compare those two distributions with openSUSE. Of the three, I think Ubuntu is the easiest to install, but it also provides the least amount of flexibility during the installation process. Of the three, Ubuntu also offers the best out-of-the-box multimedia support, largest supply of software in the default repositories and, in my opinion, the easiest methods for adding new packages. This makes Ubuntu a pretty attractive option for new computer users. That being said, openSUSE provided me with the best performance (short boot times and responsive desktop), a very flexible installer that was also pretty easy to utilize and adding community repositories is fairly straight forward, at least compared to Fedora's approach to adding third-party repositories.



The three distributions ship with different desktops and different default software. Fedora has GNOME, which I have found is pretty good on touch devices and Fedora offers Wayland support out of the box. openSUSE defaults to KDE's Plasma, but offers all of the big name desktop environments as options at install time. Ubuntu offers Unity as the desktop, which seems to be treading a line between traditional desktops and mobile-style interfaces.



Of the three distributions, I think Fedora is closest to the cutting edge, with openSUSE and Ubuntu both fairly close behind. However, Fedora and Ubuntu have relatively short support cycles with Fedora releases usually supported for about 14 months, Ubuntu 15.10 for just nine months and openSUSE 42.1 will receive three years of support.



The best distribution for the job will depend on the person and, of course, the role the distribution is to play. I think Fedora is aimed mostly at more technical users and people who like to tinker. Ubuntu is aimed squarely at Linux newcomers who generally want to just use their computer and openSUSE appears to be aiming at a sort of middle ground: people who have a little Linux experience and want options, but also want reliability and longer support cycles. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications: Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card