Review The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.
As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company's annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.
The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.
The picture is complicated by the fact that there are two different openSUSE distributions: Leap and Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed is a rolling-release distro, akin to Arch Linux; there's no stable version, and new packages emerge from the project's Factory every day.
In contrast, Leap is one of the most stable distros available. Major releases appear approximately every few years, with a new minor or point release annually. Since the last point release, 15.3, the project has synchronized its codebase with the enterprise distro. This makes it possible to migrate an installation of openSUSE Leap to the paid SLE product and receive commercial support.
As such, openSUSE Leap is more conservative technically, in part because it has a common codebase with a slow-moving enterprise distro. So while Ubuntu's latest LTS release has GNOME 42 and kernel 5.15, the latest Leap has GNOME 41 and kernel 5.14. Although SUSE Linux Enterprise does focus on servers, there is a desktop edition – but openSUSE Leap has a much broader selection of components.
Unlike the Ubuntu and Fedora model of live CDs, with different installation images for different desktop environments, the openSUSE installation image is just an installer.
Two versions are available: a 3.8GB offline image, which doesn't need a network connection, and a 173MB online installer, which fetches the source packages over the network. Both boot straight into the installation program, and there's no option to switch to a graphical desktop.
If you want to try before you buy install, the project also offers live images with KDE, GNOME, and Xfce, but the download page explicitly says: "They should not be used to install or upgrade. Please use the installation media instead."
The installer offers the same choice of three desktop environments as the live images, but that's not all. You can also install a text-only server, or an immutable server image with transactional updates, which is also available separately as Leap Micro 5.2.
There is also an option for a minimal graphical environment (which includes IceWM) onto which you can install one of the widest selection of desktops around: GNOME (basic, Wayland or X.11), KDE (basic or full), Xfce, Cinnamon, LXDE, LXQt, Enlightenment, MATE, Deepin, or Budgie, and also the Sway tiling Wayland compositor. The Deepin desktop is a new option for 15.4, and it still has some issues. Enlightenment isn't the author's favorite desktop, but still, it's good to see it included in a mainstream distro: 15.4 includes version 0.25.3, and it offers immense potential for customization as well as eye candy.
New in openSUSE Leap 15.4 is the Deepin desktop, but it still has a few rough spots
We tried KDE, as well as taking a look at Deepin and Enlightenment. As Scott Gilbertson said way back in 2015: "openSUSE's KDE desktop is one of the slickest KDE implementations around" – and we'd still agree with that. It uses the sensibly mainstream Firefox and LibreOffice, but most of the other components are KDE-specific apps, such as Kmail, Konversation, and Akregator.
There are also a few tricks in openSUSE's repertoire that few other distros do out of the box. The YaST2 system-administration tool is a huge boon. It's a point of pride among Linux illuminati to know where to find every obscure config file, what contents it should have, and which arcane text editor to use that allows them to accrue the most kudos from other geeks.
YaST lets you bypass almost all of that, using an easy menu-driven interface to configure just about every aspect of the system, from installing and updating software, the firewall, printers, the bootloader, to disk partitioning, including RAID and LVM.
In the bad old days, most distros had tools like this, but the handful of other survivors from the early 1990s have dispensed with them. It's to SUSE's credit that it still maintains this, and it works in text mode and over SSH. (Sadly, the WebYaST online version is deprecated. We'd like to see it get some TLC.)
Secondly, there's its snapshot support. By default, openSUSE formats your hard disk as a single large Btrfs volume, and enables the Snapper tool for system snapshots. This is more important if you use Tumbleweed with its frantic pace of updates, but even on Leap, if an update causes problems, the ability to simply boot back into a working snapshot is very useful in a crisis.
It has only one snag in the author's experience: snapshots can use a lot of disk space. If you use Btrfs, it needs a big root partition, far more than other distros. Older versions of openSUSE used a separate /home partition, formatted with XFS, but no longer. Now, by default, you get one big volume. That's both good and bad.
The problem is that the "perpetually unfinished" Btrfs readily gets corrupted in the event of a power failure or the disk filling up. The latter is a particular danger for two reasons. Firstly, because it can't give a straight answer to how much free space is available, and secondly, because repairing a corrupted volume is difficult and dangerous.
So having one big partition is good because it won't fill up so easily. It's bad because if it does, it will likely get corrupted, and then your files are at risk. I'm a traditionalist: I advocate going with the old way and keeping a separate home partition. But make the root partition big: as in, give it hundreds of gigabytes, rather than tens.
Alternatively, you can dispense with Snapper, format your root partition with ext4, and treat it like any other distro.
These days, openSUSE ships with Flatpak pre-installed, but the project also has a very useful repository of additional software, which saves the Ubuntu PPA and Fedora COPR faff. There's also the external Packman repo with lots of useful tools such as multimedia codecs.
openSUSE also has the blingtastic Enlightenment desktop, with a wide selection of visual effects
You can download openSUSE Leap from the project's website. There are versions for x86-64, Arm AArch64, POWER ppc64le, and IBM z Series and LinuxOne. There are also ready-rolled minimal VM "JeOS" images for KVM and Xen, Hyper-V, VMware and OpenStack Cloud.
openSUSE Leap offers a good balance between the short life cycle of Fedora and the slow one of Ubuntu LTS releases. Between the Zypper package manager and YaST front end, and the additional repos available online, we rate its software packaging offerings as noticeably better than anything Red Hat or the various Mandriva descendants have to offer.
For servers and their stressed sysadmins, YaST is a fantastic tool, and there's also deployment using AutoYAST, SaltStack, and the Uyuni management tool. And of course there's the ability to migrate to the paid SLES and enterprise support without reinstalling.
Red Hat is higher-profile: it sponsors lots of conferences and events, and works hard to foster a large, enthusiastic and even evangelistic community. SUSE isn't as big or as loud, but it's slightly older – founded in 1992, it's in its third decade. openSUSE is a more polished and mature distro, and it's just about the best on the RPM side of the Linux world. ®
Disclaimer: the author worked for SUSE until last year, although not on the openSUSE project. He retains no connection or links with the company. (And some years before that, he also worked for Red Hat.)
Microsoft celebrated the demise of Internet Explorer by releasing another Insider Dev Channel build of Windows 11 and no, Surface Pro X users need not apply.
The wind has been sucked from the sails of Microsoft's bleeding edge build of Windows by the rapid move of the new tabbed File Explorer functionality from the Dev to the Beta Channel, possibly before all the Dev Channel Insiders had a chance to check it out.
Perhaps a shame, since build 25140 contained plenty of fixes for the new code (as well as a Euphemia typeface for languages that use the Canadian Syllabic script.)
Networking kingpin Cisco is hiring more cautiously to indicate that it, like many peers, is taking note of macroeconomic red flags.
"It's a time to be prudent," Richard Scott Herren, Cisco senior veep and chief financial officer told the Nasdaq Investor Conference. "I think it is a time for everyone to be prudent… so we're doing the same."
The hot spots – or the "highest priority items for us" – including security, will continue to see investments in headcount, he said.
Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, and Teams are set to automatically load data in Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRMs using a product launched by the Redmond-based software and cloud giant today.
Dubbed Viva Sales, the product is built on the employee experience platform Microsoft Viva — launched last year — and is designed to let sales teams tag customers in Outlook, Teams or Office applications to allow data to be captured as a customer record in the CRM system.
Currently available on preview, the product syncs with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamic CRM out of the box, but customers of Oracle and SAP CRM product will have to wait for sufficient customer demand before Microsoft integrates the system with their sales software, Emily He, Microsoft corporate VP for business applications marketing, told The Register.
Microsoft and power management specialist Eaton are working together on "grid-interactive UPS technology" using Eaton's EnergyAware UPS systems to help electricity grids with the transition to renewable energy.
The two companies already had a partnership where Eaton used Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform for products including an energy management circuit breaker smart safety device, and the pair jointly released a white paper last year on the potential role of grid-interactive datacenters in grid decarbonization.
While business leaders expect quantum computing to play a significant role in industry by 2030, some experts don't believe the tech is going to be ready for production deployment in the near future.
The findings, from a survey titled "2022 Quantum Readiness" commissioned by consultancy EY, refer to UK businesses, although it is likely that the conclusions are equally applicable to global organizations.
According to EY, 81 percent of senior UK executives expect quantum computing to have a significant impact in their industry within seven and a half years, with almost half (48 percent) believing that quantum technology will begin to transform industries as soon as 2025.
Slowly but surely, software package registries are adopting multi-factor authentication (MFA) to reduce the risk of hijacked accounts, a source of potential software supply chain attacks.
This week, RubyGems, the package registry serving the Ruby development community, said it has begun showing warnings through its command line tool to those maintainers of the hundred most popular RubyGems packages who have failed to adopt MFA.
"Account takeovers are the second most common attack on software supply chains," explained Betty Li, a member of the Ruby community and senior front end developer at Shopify, in a blog post. "The countermeasure against this type of attack is simple: enabling MFA. Doing so can prevent 99.9 percent of account takeover attacks."
Opinion Consulting giant McKinsey & Company has been playing a round of MythBusters: Metaverse Edition.
Though its origins lie in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, the metaverse has been heavily talked about in business circles as if it's a real thing over the last year or so, peaking with Facebook's Earth-shattering rebrand to Meta in October 2021.
The metaverse, in all but name, is already here and has been for some time in the realm of online video games. However, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of it is not.
Right after the latest release of the KDE Frameworks comes the Plasma Desktop 5.25 plus the default desktop for the forthcoming Linux Mint 23.
Researchers at security product recommendation service Safety Detectives claim they’ve found almost a million customer records wide open on an Elasticsearch server run by Malaysian point-of-sale software vendor StoreHub.
Safety Detectives’ report states it found a StoreHub sever that stored unencrypted data and was not password protected. The security company’s researchers were therefore able to waltz in and access 1.7 billion records describing the affairs of nearly a million people, in a trove totalling over a terabyte.
StoreHub’s wares offer point of sale and online ordering, and the vendor therefore stores data about businesses that run its product and individual buyers’ activities.
Germany will be the host of the first publicly known European exascale supercomputer, along with four other EU sites getting smaller but still powerful systems, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) announced this week.
Germany will be the home of Jupiter, the "Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research." It should be switched on next year in a specially designed building on the campus of the Forschungszentrum Jülich research centre and operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), alongside the existing Juwels and Jureca supercomputers.
The four mid-range systems are: Daedalus, hosted by the National Infrastructures for Research and Technology in Greece; Levente at the Governmental Agency for IT Development in Hungary; Caspir at the National University of Ireland Galway in Ireland; and EHPCPL at the Academic Computer Centre CYFRONET in Poland.
Roboticists could learn a thing or two from insects if they're looking to build tiny AI machines capable of moving, planning, and cooperating with one another.
The six-legged creatures are the largest and most diverse multi-cellular organisms on Earth. They have evolved to live in all sorts of environments and exhibit different types of behaviors to survive and there are insects that fly, crawl, and swim.
Insects are surprisingly intelligent and energy efficient given the size of their small brains and bodies. These are traits that small simple robots should have if they are to be useful in the real world, a group of researchers posited in a paper published in Science Robotics on Wednesday.
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