I Installed openSUSE Linux, Here’s What Surprised Me

Do you consider a jump to Opensuse as your operating system? A few weeks ago, I made the jump. I crushed my Garuda Linux installation on my desktop computer with Opensuse Tumbleweed.

Like a little background, OpenSuse is one of the oldest Linux distributions still in development. You can get head-free office and server editions, and it is available for many IT architectures, including Open Source Risc-V architecture.

It is also a rare Linux distribution to offer both an edition with a rolling release cycle and a more traditional punctual release cycle, called “Tumbleweed” and “Leap” respectively. Because I tend to want to be on the software bleeding side, I went with Tumbleweed.

X11 by default

By connecting for the first time to OpenSuse and starting to click, after a few minutes, I realized that I was in an X11 session. You can probably attribute this to my trend as a journalist to pay the most attention to the Linux distributions operating on the development edge of development, but see that the X11 session indicator instead of Wayland was a bit of a shock.

X11, or Xorg, has been a fencing system used by Linux Desktops for decades. For technical reasons, X11 should be widely replaced by Wayland in the coming years. It has been due for a long time now, and it is only over the past two years, many modern Linux distributions and office environments have made Wayland with all my heart. Gnome drops completely X11, while KDE maintains the Kwin packages for X11 and Wayland – at least until Plasma 7 arrives here.

However, some avant-garde distros shipped with Wayland only by default. I saw this when I installed Bazzite Linux with plasma recently. This experience prepared me to be surprised when, after having chosen the KDE plasma as my office for OpenSuse, I see X11 as the default session. Tumbleweed being the “progressive” choice compared to OpenSuse Leap, I would have guessed that it could have been entirely passed to Wayland. This is not the case.

It is not as if there was no sense in the choice. All the software on which people count are not yet compatible with Wayland, and those who need or prefer Wayland are generally quite warned to pass.

The Kubuntu Focus laptop that I have that runs Kubuntu 24.04 LTS still works X11 and has not come with the preinstalled Wayland support. I generally have no problems with X11 on Kubuntu. In fact, continuing to take care of X11 is nice for me of the aspect of the use of my Keepassxc password manager; Its automatic function still does not work with Wayland.

That said, there are compromises. For example, KDE’s integrated screen recorder does not work under X11. You could say, however, that opensuse, providing the two by default is useful because it means that I can alternate window sessions as needed, according to what I do. It’s just a little boring to disconnect and come back to do it.

Rare preinstalled screen saving support

Another surprise was that XScreensaver was preinstalled on Opensuse Tumbleweed. It has long been the screen saving software for Linux office computers, and as you can guess by the name, it is designed to operate with X11. There is no support for the Wayland sessions.

It is increasingly rare to find PCs in general using screen savering, at least by default. The original function of burn-in prevention sensors is not necessary on today’s monitors. It is also more economical in power to simply deactivate the monitor during inactivity than to show a visual presentation which sometimes has a high intensity of graphics. For this reason, many Linux developers do not pre-package any screen saving software in their distributions.

These facts do not discredit how cool screen saver can be. Having careful animation like a Pacman game on the screen while you are absent is ideal for PC configuration. So it could be vain, but I appreciate that XScreensaver is available from the start.

… but xscreensaver does not play well with my equipment

While I was delighted to see him installed, XScreensaver was unfortunately proven not to work well for me on OpenSuse. Mainly, I had the problem of the unlocking dialog of XScreensaver constantly flashing when I move the mouse and start to type my password.

It can be a bug with the XScreensaver software, or with KDE plasma, or with OpenSuse itself, or with my configuration of specific graphics equipment. It could also be any combination of these things.

I went through the FAQ and the XSCREENSAVER guide on an appropriate installation on KDE office computers, but the flashing unlocking dialog has never disappeared. Sometimes the screen economy simply does not take care either, and the monitor becomes in empty place. I have not yet understood what causes this.

I hope I can understand it, and I hope that more broadly the tradition of screen savings will find a way to survive the transition to Wayland.

Yast is cool, if he is a bit overwhelming

One of the aspects of opensuse that people like to comment on a lot is Yast (abbreviation of “yet another configuration tool”). It is a set of installation and configuration software that allows you to manage almost all aspects of your computer and via several interfaces. You can interact graphically and via the terminal to control about anything.

Diving in it, I quickly realized that I was above my head. There are Yast modules for everything, from the configuration of samba servers to the management of printers through virtual machines. It was difficult to know where to start.

A Yast tool that stood out was the graphical configuration of the start -up charger. It allows me to change start -up chargers, modify the core settings and modify the common settings such as hiding or revealing the menu and modifying the default option. Treating with Grub can be intimidating is therefore great to have a simple and explicit graphic application to do what I have to do, especially with my double boot configuration.

All well considered, it is impressive to see how the 31 years of opensuse development resulted in an autonomous ecosystem of various software. In practice, however, I hesitate to commit to learning everything when I am already rooted in the workflows of Debian and Arch. I am not sure I want to relearn the processes for the routines that I have already established in other Linux distributions, in particular on a daily pilot desk.

Looking beyond the screen saving seeds and a few other strange behaviors, I did not ultimately hated the open experience. The fact that X11 and Wayland are preinstalled are useful for troubleshooting problems with applications that have graphic dysfunctions.

I have reservations on the creation of OpenSuse my full -time office and possibly a server base, but I am interested in seeing what I can find other to dig via Yast and other unique open experiences. In addition, I would take it on Windows 11 every day.

If you want to try it, go to the OpenSuse website and choose between Tumbleweed and Leap. See our guide to install Linux to find out more about the overall switching process for operating systems.