openSUSE Leap Initial Impressions

I finally got openSUSE Leap installed on my Thinkpad. It is running kernel 5.3.18, which should be sufficient for this 4+-year-old Thinkpad. So far, all the hardware works as expected with no issues. Leap is the non-rolling release that tracks with SUSE Linux Enterprise Linux, SLES, and tends to touch on the older software and favors the LTS versions. Of course, I installed KDE Plasma as my desktop, which is version 5.18, the LTS version. While there a few small differences, the user avatar issue doesn’t exist, which is good to know. If there weren’t already a bug for it, I would file one as this narrows down the issue’s introductions. I again did the default filesystem configuration with Btrfs for my whole system. Performance has been acceptable, and I don’t seem to have this odd graphical glitch occurring on Kubuntu 20.10. The issue wasn’t consistent but did happen. I may have to see if Tumbleweed on this machine has the same problem.

Installing codecs was again a breeze. I used the same method of installing opi to add packman repos. I also leveraged opi to install hugo since it isn’t available in the main repositories. Hugo is the newest version, so that was nice to see. Firefox on Leap is the latest ESR version, a tad unfortunate, but not a deal-breaker. All of my Firefox extensions work just fine. I used rustup to install Rust, which went smoothly. I also used the same pattern to get gcc and other dev tools installed.

So far, another uneventful and seamless experience. If I want stability and an extended support cycle, this would be an excellent choice. I have tried snap or flatpak yet, and there is some software that I can’t get any other way, so I will probably try out flatpak sooner than later. I am happy with it, and there is nothing to give me pause initially.

Thanks for reading,

Jamie

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