OPENSUSE 15.1
This project has been in a state of unrest for some time now, and Mayank Sharma wonders if that has left a mark on the distro.
This project has been in a state of unrest for some time now, and Mayank Sharma wonders if that uncertainty has left a mark on the distro.
We last reviewed opensuse more than three years ago and the distro has had some interesting updates and changes since then. It has reorganised, and starting with the 15.0 release last year, SUSE’S enterprise version and opensuse are now being developed in tandem from the ground up.
The opensuse distro maintains two main branches. There’s a rolling release dubbed Tumbleweed, pitched at developers and experienced users. Leap is the regular distro that comes out once a year, and because of its alignment with SLE will not get any major architectural changes for several years, unlike its closest competition Fedora and Ubuntu. This apparent sluggishness helps opensuse Leap pitch itself as a much more stable option that claims to be better suited for running servers and enterprise desktops.
The Leap flavour that we’re reviewing is available in two formats. There are a couple of Live installable mediums for Gnome and KDE, as well as an allencompassing install-only medium. OPENSUSE now sports a new installer that has everything we want from a distro installer; it’s intuitive to operate, comes with reasonable defaults, and offers enough tweakable parameters for advanced users to mould the installation.
One of the most crucial elements of any installer is the partitioner, and opensuse’s has been rewritten to be more dexterous. It offers an interesting option called System Roles, which are predefined use-cases to help setup the system for a particular purpose.
In addition to Gnome and KDE desktops and a Server option, the 15.1 installer has a new role called Transactional Server. This is different from the server role in that it uses a read-only root filesystem and comes from the Kubernetes on SUSE project, Kubic. The pitch for this feature is that it includes an update system that applies updates as a single operation, which makes it easier for users to do Btrfs rollbacks for multiple packages.
Incremental updates
There have been several changes and improvements for desktop users as well. For instance, the distro has finally moved to the Firewalld firewall management tool. Also, while 15.1 ships with the 4.12 kernel, the developers have back-ported graphics drivers from the 4.19 kernel to enable the distro to support newer graphics hardware, particularly that based on the AMD Vega chipset. Administrators who want to roll out opensuse on multiple computers will appreciate the Autoyast mechanism for mass deployments that features improved usability with more useful profiles and other changes. The installation in itself is a pretty standard affair. Like most leading distros, opensuse gives equal weight to both KDE and the Gnome desktop, and both perform well and are equally stable. The YAST configuration tool remains one of the unique features of the distro and you can use it to influence all aspects of the installation. Besides the package management rolled into
YAST, the distro includes a graphical app store-like app called Discover. In addition to the usual app categories, this has the option to install available app add-ons as well.
One oddity we noticed is that while the distro includes the VLC media player, it isn’t of much use straight out of the box as the distro doesn’t ship with codecs to play the files in the most popular formats. To install the necessary codecs you’ll have to pull them after enabling the Packman repository.
This process, however, won’t be obvious to new users unless they spend some time reading through the project’s documentation. The developers should seriously consider including useful information like this within the installation itself.