The big thing with this release is Leap now uses the same binaries as SUSE Enterprise, giving better support options. A good CentOS replacement for those still looking.
I can vouch for Leap being a great CentOS replacement. I switched to Suse around when Fedora 34 came out and I have turned into a huge fan. Converted my homelab to be completely Suse based and I have zero regrets.
> A good CentOS replacement for those still looking.
Unless your company requires you to use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Linux (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/defe...), which is supported on RHEL, CentOS, SLES, and a few others, but not openSUSE ("distributions [...] that are not explicitly listed are unsupported, even if they are derived from the officially supported distributions").
Leap 15.3 is build on SLES, and if you need support from Microsoft, you have lost already...not to mention a IT-Department who installs a Antivirus on a Linux endpoint...and probably forgot about the HID.
But if one needs to check for (windows) virus's do it on the file-server/email-server level and not on the linux endpoint, use something like selinux and a host intrusion detection system instead, it's just a waste of money and power to use a antivirus...even on a good maintained windows.
Yes, as a 10-year user of Tumbleweed, generally OpenSUSE is left behind when it comes to downloading binary packages from first-party sources.
Even for the Microsoft software that "supports" OpenSUSE, historically that support was by expecting OpenSUSE users to use their RHEL packages which didn't always work well. [1] [2] (I don't know if the problems are still there, because I switched to the Docker image for `az` and stopped using `powershell`)
Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t 15.3 based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3 and supported until December 2022? (I may be mis-understanding SUSE releases..).
One of the things I liked about CentOS was not having to upgrade every x months/years.
Major Releases are supported for at least 3 years, but are officially supported until a successor is released. Minor releases are supported for 18 months. So that is a downside, it is not quite the support level of CentOS, albeit having a dedicated minor release support schedule is nice (For RHEL at least you are expected to update to the newest minor release unless you pay extra).
You still have to upgrade your CentOS machines to the interim point releases to maintain support don’t you? With CentOS version X.y becomes unsupported as soon as version X.y+1 is released, that’s why it got turned into Stream, so it was always getting updates instead of having dead periods where sometimes systems would go weeks or months without support from packages released in RHEL.
You never hear much about OpenSuse or Suse, but whenever you do, users seem very happy with it. Is it just a perspective thing, or is there another reason why it isn't huge like Ubuntu or Fedora?
I am a Suse convert and I advocate loudly for it mostly because you don’t hear much about it, so passion compensates for mindshare. Yast, Zypper, microos (a transactional update rolling spin) are all fantastic products and I’m a huge fan of Tumbleweed gaming systems because you get all of the newest updates for Mesa, Vulcan, etc....and because of the openQA system things are generally better tested than they are in Arch.
Tumbleweed got Gnome 40 stable before Fedora 34 was released and it’s been rock solid for me since day 1. And updates are generally extremely safe because if an update breaks your system you can just rollback to a previous Btrfs snapshot with one command and a reboot, wait a bit and issues are fixed very quickly.
While it was intended for servers, if you set it up right it can be an openSuSE equivalent of Fedora Silverblue, even better if you prefer Plasma as I do. It takes a little work to get to an exact equivalent (IIRC toolbox had to be installed and some extra set up after install).
Also to note, if you don't want a rolling version, Leap does offer a transactional server option in the installer.
Yes, I've tested out the Gnome version of their transactional-update based Desktop. It was a generally good experience but I remember having issues with certain packages and ended up going back to regular Tumbleweed, but I'm hopeful for the future as it's very close to what I want out of the box - will definitely give it another try the future.
I'm using a transactional-update based leap server for a container host right now and it's been awesome - I just upgraded it to 15.3 and seems to be working just fine as well.
The only bad thing about the transactional server, and IIRC openSuSe doesn't mention it anywhere last I saw, is that you can't break up your root filesystem other than /home.
I had installed / on an nvme drive which my BIOS doesn't boot from, so I have /boot on a separate partition. Breaks on every kernel update (although trivial to fix).
It's a nice OS, but my biggest pet peeve is that it doesn't come with h264 repos installed [0]. One has to first add them otherwise one won't be able to play most videos or music in your browser. Some configuration is therefore necessary and I can't just install it in 15 minutes then hand it over to the owner.
It's a pity because the fastest way to scare the average user away from Linux is to force them to open a shell in order to have a working setup. Hopefully that's something that'll change.
As a technical user, I enjoy it though. YaST is great for configuring many parts of the system, the documentation is great and it's stable. If Nix ever gets usable, I might give it a shot, but it's OpenSuse all the way for now [1]
Doesn’t Ubuntu require you to manually install restricted extras, and fedora needs rpm fusion. I don’t see how this is more advantageous than just enabling packman in yast and switching the packages over with a single click.
I think no longer. I installed a new Xubuntu a bit more than a year ago and so far all videos from the Web and they few DVDs I have watched did just work. I was a bit surprised by that.
Yes, you need a repo from Packman. Less than 15 minutes to set that up if you know what you are doing. Yeah, if you don't install a new machine frequently you will have forgotten the details until the next time. And some guides on the net are not as good as others. Haven't done it myself for many months, so once again I don't remember it in detail.
I guess the reason is that their corporate lawyers tell them that they must not do it. There might be patent issues buried in that code.
openSUSE has a nice pacing, it's new enough to be a great platform but it's not changing so quickly you need a fresh installation every handful of months or you're constantly fixing things. The tooling is good as well, there are some aesthetic things I kind of dislike (like some of the config files in /etc should be a layer deeper, ATMO) but it works well and it's well made. Major upgrades tend to work and aren't that scary.
The transactional system versions (MicroOS and then TW can be installed as "transactional") are potentially game changers. The snapper integration with btrfs and grub makes a really compelling case if you've ever needed it; btrfs seems like it's getting closer and closer.
This is my interpretation: If you go back to when RHEL was spawned, there were sort of two distinct styles of Linux systems, they were very much and east coast and west coast sort of style. UNIX dorks may disagree with this, but SuSe has provided something more like a European style. They have tools for updating configuration files and they provide some opinions on how things should be run. Once you get used to it and in to it, it's nice.
Compared to the dnf, zypper feels slow because it doesn't support parallel package download. If you have a good network bandwidth it might be on under utilized. I'm also a Tumbleweed user and when doing a dup of full rebuild slowness is more noticeable.
Too many programs that I was not able to install due to dependency problems. This is rarely a problem under Ubuntu. But I admit that it has been ages that I moved away from SuSE.
I will likely leave Ubuntu if snap becomes too common or the rule.
By the way, SuSE does an IPO soon but the IPO price looks steep.
Not PP, but the only thing I can figure as an end user is rpm does have a reputation for dependency hell, which is pretty much moot with front ends such as yum, dnf and zypper.
I can see if I were a package maintainer I might have a different opinion, and get "tired" (more like "fed up", no pun intended) of a format.
I only had to make my own packages once or twice when I was a Debian user, Debian packages seemed a chore, and I always resorted to using things like checkinstall and debhelper.
With RPM, I don't hesitate to write a spec when I need a package of a piece of software not provided in the repos, and spec files are pretty easy to work with.
(I tend to favor using packages over 'make install').
As a counterpoint, I experienced the exact opposite. I got tired of deb-based distros leaving me in package limbo if something went wrong. I'm sure there's an easy fix, or maybe the entire problem is fixed now, but I've been a very happy user of opensuse (and just suse before that) for a long time - well over 15 years now. I love their huge range of optional software repos. I can have a nice stable base system with only certain software bleeding edge.
In the past year I've deployed Leap on 5 different workstations and servers. Three of them with more complicated active directory logins, and pam_mount setups. I've also compiled and installed a variety of academic software that was otherwise challenging to get working on CentOS.
Overall I'm very happy with Leap, and Yast makes some of the more complicated things a lot more straightforward.
> Checkout what opensuse is currently building here
Actually the service is completely open and cross-distro. Everybody can build anything for all major distros. In practice the majority is probably related to OpenSUSE.
I have built packages for OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Arch. Just for myself if I needed to patch or try out something or I needed something not available in the standard distro repos.
39 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadThe big thing with this release is Leap now uses the same binaries as SUSE Enterprise, giving better support options. A good CentOS replacement for those still looking.
Unless your company requires you to use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Linux (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/defe...), which is supported on RHEL, CentOS, SLES, and a few others, but not openSUSE ("distributions [...] that are not explicitly listed are unsupported, even if they are derived from the officially supported distributions").
What do they actually do, other than actually increasing attack vectors?
That's the main-point of having a Antivirus :-)
But if one needs to check for (windows) virus's do it on the file-server/email-server level and not on the linux endpoint, use something like selinux and a host intrusion detection system instead, it's just a waste of money and power to use a antivirus...even on a good maintained windows.
Even for the Microsoft software that "supports" OpenSUSE, historically that support was by expecting OpenSUSE users to use their RHEL packages which didn't always work well. [1] [2] (I don't know if the problems are still there, because I switched to the Docker image for `az` and stopped using `powershell`)
[1]: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/6184
[2]: https://github.com/Azure/azure-cli/issues/7523
One of the things I liked about CentOS was not having to upgrade every x months/years.
Tumbleweed got Gnome 40 stable before Fedora 34 was released and it’s been rock solid for me since day 1. And updates are generally extremely safe because if an update breaks your system you can just rollback to a previous Btrfs snapshot with one command and a reboot, wait a bit and issues are fixed very quickly.
While it was intended for servers, if you set it up right it can be an openSuSE equivalent of Fedora Silverblue, even better if you prefer Plasma as I do. It takes a little work to get to an exact equivalent (IIRC toolbox had to be installed and some extra set up after install).
Also to note, if you don't want a rolling version, Leap does offer a transactional server option in the installer.
I'm using a transactional-update based leap server for a container host right now and it's been awesome - I just upgraded it to 15.3 and seems to be working just fine as well.
I had installed / on an nvme drive which my BIOS doesn't boot from, so I have /boot on a separate partition. Breaks on every kernel update (although trivial to fix).
It's a pity because the fastest way to scare the average user away from Linux is to force them to open a shell in order to have a working setup. Hopefully that's something that'll change.
As a technical user, I enjoy it though. YaST is great for configuring many parts of the system, the documentation is great and it's stable. If Nix ever gets usable, I might give it a shot, but it's OpenSuse all the way for now [1]
[0]: https://en.opensuse.org/Additional_package_repositories
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYRlTISvjww
I guess the reason is that their corporate lawyers tell them that they must not do it. There might be patent issues buried in that code.
openSUSE has a nice pacing, it's new enough to be a great platform but it's not changing so quickly you need a fresh installation every handful of months or you're constantly fixing things. The tooling is good as well, there are some aesthetic things I kind of dislike (like some of the config files in /etc should be a layer deeper, ATMO) but it works well and it's well made. Major upgrades tend to work and aren't that scary.
The transactional system versions (MicroOS and then TW can be installed as "transactional") are potentially game changers. The snapper integration with btrfs and grub makes a really compelling case if you've ever needed it; btrfs seems like it's getting closer and closer.
This is my interpretation: If you go back to when RHEL was spawned, there were sort of two distinct styles of Linux systems, they were very much and east coast and west coast sort of style. UNIX dorks may disagree with this, but SuSe has provided something more like a European style. They have tools for updating configuration files and they provide some opinions on how things should be run. Once you get used to it and in to it, it's nice.
Too many programs that I was not able to install due to dependency problems. This is rarely a problem under Ubuntu. But I admit that it has been ages that I moved away from SuSE.
I will likely leave Ubuntu if snap becomes too common or the rule.
By the way, SuSE does an IPO soon but the IPO price looks steep.
I can see if I were a package maintainer I might have a different opinion, and get "tired" (more like "fed up", no pun intended) of a format.
I only had to make my own packages once or twice when I was a Debian user, Debian packages seemed a chore, and I always resorted to using things like checkinstall and debhelper.
With RPM, I don't hesitate to write a spec when I need a package of a piece of software not provided in the repos, and spec files are pretty easy to work with. (I tend to favor using packages over 'make install').
But I would never switch to Deb, that's just a pain.
But NetBSD would be the best match for your G5
[1]: https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:PinePhone
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCrGi8hsGhY
Overall I'm very happy with Leap, and Yast makes some of the more complicated things a lot more straightforward.
It's really powerful.
Checkout what opensuse is currently building here; https://build.opensuse.org/monitor
Actually the service is completely open and cross-distro. Everybody can build anything for all major distros. In practice the majority is probably related to OpenSUSE.
I have built packages for OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Arch. Just for myself if I needed to patch or try out something or I needed something not available in the standard distro repos.