OpenSUSE Tumbleweed installation notes

by Perroboc

2 min read

linux

I keep testing rolling distros, and I read that OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a good option to Arch. Here's my experience.

OOTB experience

  • The Good
    • Wayland comes preinstalled. Just make sure to select it at login screen in the session dropdown menu.
  • The Bad
    • Default KDE Plasma experience is really bloated. It even comes with TigerVNC preinstalled!
    • No sudo, only su. This means that you don't evelate your user to administrator, you use another user account which might have a different password.
  • The Ugly
    • OpenSUSE uses a suite of programs to configure the system, called YaST. I don't know what UI library it uses, but it's ugly at HIDPI resolutions.
    • No KDE partition manager, but a SUSE specific one. At least it's able to create folders by itself!
    • At first, it seems that everything is in the Discover KDE app store (cool!), BUT actually some software (like git) is not available there, and you have to go to YaST software to get that.

My reasons to quit:

  • Wasn't able to add my network printer, it wouldn't detect it. Seems it doesn't come with avahi or zeroconf compatibility.
  • Uses GRUB2. Not by default, it's just that it's the only option. I've grown to like systemd-boot.
  • Uses RPM packages for missing stuff.
  • YaST sure does look like a good set of tools, but I didn't like that it disables KDE's default settings windows, or outright butchers them (i.e. Printer Settings)
  • No sudo? So if I change my user password, I can't change the admin password and have to change that separately.

Use sudo

Following the openSUSE guide, I found this a better way:

  1. Edit sudoers file with sudo visudo
  2. Uncomment the %wheel line (should be line 86)
    %wheel        ALL=(ALL)       ALL
  3. Exit vi, and then add your user to the wheel group, replacing <username> with your username:
    sudo usermod -aG wheel <username>
  4. Execute sudo visudo again, and comment the following lines:
    #Defaults targetpw    # ask for the password of the target user i.e. root
#ALL ALL=(ALL) ALL # WARNING! Only use this together with 'Defaults targetpw'!
  5. Log out, and log back in.

Software

1password:

sudo rpm --import https://downloads.1password.com/linux/keys/1password.asc
sudo zypper ar https://downloads.1password.com/linux/rpm/stable/x86_64 1password
sudo zypper install 1password

Visual Studio Code:

sudo rpm --import https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc
sudo zypper addrepo https://packages.microsoft.com/yumrepos/vscode vscode
sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper install code