openSUSE 42.2 Leap



openSUSE is a community distribution which shares code and infrastructure with SUSE Linux Enterprise. The openSUSE distribution is available in two editions. The first is a stable, point release edition with a conservative base called Leap. The second edition is an experimental rolling release called Tumbleweed. The openSUSE project recently released a new update to the Leap edition, launching openSUSE 42.2 Leap in mid-November. Leap editions receive approximately three years of security updates and minor point releases are published about once per year. The new 42.2 release includes a long term support kernel (Linux 4.4) and KDE's Plasma 5.8 desktop which is also supposed to receive long term support from its upstream project.



openSUSE 42.2 is available primarily for 64-bit x86 computers. There are ARM ports available, but they need to be tracked down through the project's wiki and are not available through the main Download page. The new release is available in two builds, a 4.1GB DVD and a 95MB net-install disc. I opted to download the larger of the two ISO files for my trial.



Booting from the DVD brings up a menu asking if we would like to boot from an existing operating system on our hard disk, perform a fresh installation, perform an upgrade of an existing copy of openSUSE or launch the distribution's rescue console. There is no live desktop option available. openSUSE uses a graphical system installer which begins by showing us the project's license. On this first screen we can select our preferred language from one drop-down box and our keyboard's layout from another. The next stage of the installer covers partitioning the computer's hard disk. openSUSE's installer will offer to set up a swap partition and Btrfs volume by default and we have the option of tweaking the suggested layout or manually partitioning the drive. The manual partitioning screen offers a lot of options, spread across many screens and includes controls for working with NFS shares, tmpfs file systems and regular partitions. There is a lot of power in openSUSE's partitioning tools and I found them to be well organized.



The next screen of the system installer gets us to select our time zone from a map of the world. We can then select which user interface to set up, with options including KDE's Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, a minimal X session or a text console. The default interface is the Plasma desktop. We can then create a user account for ourselves and we have the option of giving our user account administrator access. The installer then shows us a list of actions it plans to take and we can adjust these by clicking links provided in the summary. This allows us to adjust where the openSUSE boot loader is installed, which software packages to install and what background services to run. The installer copies its files to our hard drive and then reboots the computer. On the surface, the installer is easy to navigate and we can often take the default settings provided. However, the installer does give us the option of digging in deep, performing surprisingly detailed customizations, making openSUSE's system installer one of the most flexible I have used.





openSUSE 42.2 -- Running LibreOffice and VLC

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openSUSE boots to a graphical login screen. The login screen offers four graphical sessions, which actually turn out to be two pairs of duplications - there are two entries for the Plasma desktop and two entries for an IceWM session. The IceWM environment is minimal and reminds me a bit of Windows 95 in its style and layout. I think this is a handy option to have in case we need to rescue the system without access to the Plasma desktop, but I think the full featured Plasma environment will be more appealing to most people.



I tried running openSUSE 42.2 in two environments, on a desktop computer and in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The distribution performed well in VirtualBox. The desktop was fairly responsive and openSUSE automatically integrates with the VirtualBox environment, allowing me to make use of my display's full resolution. I had a little trouble at first with the desktop computer. openSUSE would boot on the desktop machine, but turned off my monitor early in the boot process. This meant the operating system was running and would respond to keyboard input, but I could not see anything. Booting the computer with the nomodeset kernel parameter fixed this issue and provided me with a working display. openSUSE ran smoothly on the desktop computer after the screen issue was resolved and presented me with no further problems. In either environment, when logged into the Plasma desktop, the distribution required about 380MB of memory.



When I first began using openSUSE with the Plasma desktop, I noticed a few small annoyances. One was that openSUSE, like several other distributions, locks the screen after just five minutes. This can be distracting when reading or addressing other tasks at one's desk. Fortunately, the screen lock timer can easily be adjusted from the Plasma settings panel. Another feature I did not like was the loud "bong" sound which would play whenever I closed a window or received a notification. Audio notifications can be disabled, but in Plasma 5 it appears as though notifications must be disabled for each specific application and service that makes noise, I could not find any system-wide way to disable the notifications. One final issue I had was font sizes, especially in the virtual terminal where the font size was unusually small. Font sizes can be adjusted as needed.



Shortly after signing into my account a notification appeared in the system tray letting me know there were software updates available in the distribution's repositories. On the day openSUSE 42.2 was launched, there were six new updates available (of unknown size). Clicking the notification icon brought up a small widget which listed the available packages and presented me with an Update button to click. The updates then downloaded and were installed without any problems. Later in the week a few more updates trickled in and I think the total count by the end of the week was just under 20 updates.





openSUSE 42.2 -- Checking for software updates

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In the system tray there is a widget which shows us information on various services. The widget has tabs which we can click to see information on available software updates, printers and devices which have been paired using the KDE Connect service. I found these status panels to be useful, but I did find myself wishing there was a button within the widget to configure the listed services. To actually set up a KDE Connect pairing or configure printers we need to visit the Plasma settings panel.



openSUSE, when installed with the Plasma desktop, ships with a wide range of software, much of it built using the Qt framework. The distribution offers us the Firefox web browser (without Flash support), the KMail e-mail client, the Konversation IRC client and the Kopete messaging software. LibreOffice is available along with the KOrganizer personal organizer software and the Okular document viewer. We are given Cloud Storage Manager for synchronizing files across cloud services. The Amarok audio player, the Dragon Player video player and KsCD disc player are included. openSUSE does not ship with codecs for most popular media formats and I will come back to multimedia support later. The K3b disc burning software is included for us along with the KGet download manager, the Ark archive manager, the KWrite text editor and a hardware information browser. The distribution offers a number of applications for acquiring, editing and managing images, including digiKam, Gwenview, showFoto and the GNU Image Manipulation Program. openSUSE provides some accessibly tools, including a screen magnifier. The Qt 5 Designer application is featured for people who want to design their own desktop software. openSUSE ships with a few games and the KDE Connect software for pairing and working with Android devices. Java is present and the distribution runs an e-mail server in the background. I found openSUSE ships with systemd 228 and version 4.4 of the Linux kernel.



While exploring openSUSE's collection of software, I ran into some quirks of the distribution. For instance, selecting the Manage Printing tool from the application menu launches Firefox and opens the local CUPS web interface. This is probably not what most people want. On the other hand, there is a second entry in the application menu called Print Settings which opens the CUPS configuration application where we can set up and manage printers. Having these two functionally different tools with similar names is likely to cause a bit of confusion. While the CUPS web interface could not find my printer, the Print Settings panel easily found and set up my printer for me.



I experimented with the Cloud Storage Manager application which helps us connect to file synchronization services like Box and Dropbox. I found that taking the default settings when connecting to a Dropbox account would report an error saying no suitable encryption key could be found. The application tells us to go away and create a security key and try again, without any option to automatically generate a new key. This is also likely to confuse and frustrate users, especially those used to running Dropbox on other platforms where there is no mention of security keys. In all fairness, we can opt to use password protection instead of a key, but this does mean we need to create an extra password to sync our files across services.



In the Plasma application menu we can find a launcher called Install/Remove Software. This entry launches a YaST module for managing software on the system. The default interface shows us a search box on the left side of the software manager where we can provide keywords or package names. Over on the right side of the window we see a list of packages matching our search parameters. I suspect most people will prefer to see grouped categories of software which can be accessed by clicking the View button and selecting Package Groups. This shows us a tree menu of software categories on the left side of the package manager and packages in the highlighted group on the right. We can click a box next to packages we wish to install or remove. I found the software manager generally worked well for me, quickly downloading and installing (or deleting) packages. For people who prefer working with packages from the command line, openSUSE provides the quick and friendly zypper command line package manager.



One minor issue I had with the software manager was applications are sometimes located in different categories in the software manager than they are in the Plasma application menu. For example, the Cheese webcam utility is listed in the Graphics category in the software manager, but once installed Cheese can be found in the Multimedia section of the Plasma menu.





openSUSE 42.2 -- Browsing available software

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Earlier I mentioned openSUSE does not provide Flash or popular media codecs in the default installation and these items are not available in the project's main repositories. There are a few ways we can go about acquiring these media-related extras. Perhaps the most popular method is the "1-Click" installation method. I gave this a try, first going to the openSUSE wiki and doing a search for "multimedia codecs". This took me to a page on media codecs which explained the 1-Click installation method. Following the provided link took me to a third-party website where we can click an installation button. This downloads a file which causes the YaST software manager to launch. YaST warns us that enabling a third-party repository may damage our operating system. Assuming we choose to continue, YaST then asks us if it okay to break our installed copy of the K3b disc burning software. Assuming we bravely continue, we are asked to confirm we are okay with the necessary media packages being installed. When these steps have been completed, I found I could play audio files in Amarok, but Dragon Player failed to play any video files. I had to go back to the software manager and install another video player (VLC in my case) in order to watch videos. Flash support is not included either and requires another trip to the software manager.



When I first tried the 1-Click method, the first time through the enabling of third-party repositories failed due to an error communicating with the server. The second time I tried, another process had locked the package manager and I had to make a trip to the command line to kill the offending process. The third time around, the installation worked. Please bear in mind, the 1-Click approach outlined above is generally presented as the easy way to install media codecs. An alternative approach involves looking up community repositories in openSUSE's documentation and using the zypper command line package manager to enable the necessary repositories. Neither approach is particularly user friendly.



While multimedia is probably the biggest chink in openSUSE's armour, the YaST system administration panel is probably the distribution's strongest feature. The YaST panel is divided into eight sections: Software, Hardware, System, Network Services, Security and Users, Virtualization, Support, and Miscellaneous. Using YaST we can launch configuration modules for managing software on the system, managing software repositories and updating packages on our system. There are modules for setting up printers and scanners, browsing our hardware information and changing the keyboard's layout. There are also tools for adjusting the computer's clock and working with user accounts. There are disk partitioning tools, a module for adjusting network settings and another for working with the firewall. There are also tools for setting up NFS and Samba shares and configuring the e-mail server. Going further down the list we find modules for working with sudo, viewing the systemd journal and working with Snapper file system snapshots.





openSUSE 42.2 -- The Plasma and YaST settings panels

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While all of the YaST modules worked well for me, two really stood out as being useful. One was the sudo configuration editor. This tool makes dealing with sudo's somewhat cryptic syntax much easier. We can select a user account and the program (or programs) the user should be able to run and the module works out the details for us.



The other utility I enjoyed a lot was Snapper. The Snapper module shows us a list of Btrfs snapshots and lets us browse them and compare the contents of snapshots side-by-side. This makes it easy to see what changes have been made on the system and, if need be, we can revert old configuration changes. The YaST modules automatically create new snapshots whenever we make changes to the operating system. Snapper provides us with both an audit trail of changes and a way to fix bad changes. If a configuration change breaks the operating system, we can reboot and boot from an older snapshot of the operating system to roll back the change.





openSUSE 42.2 -- Browsing Snapper snapshots

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Conclusions



If you read the approximately 2,400 words of my review which led up to this point, you probably noticed I ran into a number of annoyances with openSUSE 42.2, particularly with regards to the desktop making frequent "bong" sounds, small fonts and getting multimedia support enabled. While these issues did cause a good deal of frustration on my first day with the distribution, things quickly got sorted out thanks to the excellent settings managers provided by openSUSE and the Plasma desktop. Soon, I had a nicer theme, a quieter desktop and my multimedia files were playing. This meant most of my issues were solved on the first day and, after that, I was able to relax and enjoy a pleasantly stable, quite polished experience.



openSUSE succeeded in providing a stable, responsive environment in which to work. The YaST configuration modules made tweaking the underlying operating system much easier than it is on most other distributions and I like that openSUSE Leap users can expect three years of security updates. openSUSE may not have quite as much software in its main repositories as Debian and its children have, but community repositories fill in most of the gaps for openSUSE users.



Generally speaking, I was happy with openSUSE and I especially like how the administration tools automatically create file system snapshots, which protect the operating system against changes we make. This means openSUSE is nearly invincible in the face of bad configurations or package upgrades and it will usually take hardware failure to knock the operating system off-line.



This is not an operating system I would recommend to newcomers. The advanced features of the installer and the pain of setting up media support are likely to put off beginners. And novice Linux users are not as likely to benefit from the powerful features of YaST and Btrfs. However, for people who have been using Linux for a while, openSUSE provides a wonderful collection of very powerful tools which I find appealing. * * * * * 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