Linux After Dark – Episode 118

0:00This late-night Linux family podcast is made possible by our patrons. Go to latenightlinux.com slash support for details of how you can join them. Support us on Patreon for access to ad-free episodes and early releases. That's latenightlinux.com slash support. Hello and welcome to episode 118 of Linux After Dark. I'm Joe, I'm Chris, I'm Gary, and I'm me. Welcome back all. I thought it might be a nice idea to do an open-suza challenge. We don't talk about open-suza at all seemingly and none of us use it, but I thought let's check it out, it can't be that bad, right? So how did we get on with this? I don't want to say death by a thousand counts, but there were certainly some rough edges that I hadn't expected for a distro that's been around for as long as open-suza. What did we all go for just briefly? What did you install? I went for leap, gnome. I did tumble-weed XFCE.

1:00Why did you go for tumble-weed, Chris? Because I knew you'd go for leap XFCE, so it'd just be two of us talking about a stable distro with a stable D. Also, I do run Debian with backported kernel and things, so it's not really Debian stable. If I move off what I run now, I think I'd be likely to think about potentially curated rolling or immutable atomic type distro, even though I would stick with XFCE because of things like getting newer pod man, newer distro box working well, I might be homogeneely about my desktop environment, but that doesn't necessarily mean I always want everything underneath to be super old, you know? Yeah. Kerry, you said there were paper carts, but ultimately, did you just have a kind of, well, this is Linux, it's gnome, it's a distro, I can do what I want with it, experience. I wish.

2:01So the paper carts really started for the during the install process, and leap seems to use this installer that I can't remember the name of, but it's effectively running in a browser in full screen. And it's almost like that it's never been used by anyone outside of Germany during the QA process. That's the only thing I could say. It's set my keyboard layout to German. I changed that. It then set my language to German. I changed that to English UK. My time zone was still set to Berlin. I had to change that to English UK. And in any other distro, just changing language and region is enough to change all of these things to a somewhat sane default. That was not the case here. I don't know why. Yeah, I did notice that. And I noticed that whenever I put the mouse too far towards the top of the screen, the kind of window crime of the browser started to show, which was a bit weird. Yeah. And when it booted up for me because I was doing

3:04this in a VM on a wise 5070, it just took forever. Like the Firefox window popped up and then it went into full screen a couple of seconds later. And then it loaded the page and it just felt incredibly sluggish. Now, admittedly, I'm running it in a VM on not the strongest hardware. But if it was a normal desktop app, I don't think that would have been the case. So it's probably worth saying that they are retooling how the installer and management works in Sousa, which I didn't realize until after I'd done a lot of this. So Agama is the replacement for the installer part of Yast, which is yet another setup tool, is that right? And then the idea is that the management side of it will shift to cockpit, the same cockpit that you know and love from maybe Fedora or anything like that. So a web-based server management element. So it is in a little bit of flux. And weirdly, for me, I didn't get that. I would have thought Tumbleweed

4:08would be where you would kind of dog food that installer. But they've done it a bit weirdly. I have to say like I agree with you, Gary. I didn't realize I could have downloaded an Agama image and then installed Tumbleweed from it. Because when you go to the Tumbleweed page, it has kind of ISOs that have the old installer. So that's why I ended up using. Also, you're not supposed to use the live media to install, which I didn't realize until right at the end of the process. But again, that's strange to me. I'm just used to using the live environment to see whether I like something and then also be able to install from it. You're supposed to do a separate installer image? Apparently so. And this is just as we came to air, I was looking around. So they offer like one gig ISOs with different desktop environments. But it says in a kind of admonition above it, these live images should not be used to install and you should use the installer images above.

5:08So I just went all in and downloaded the full multi gig ISO image that had all the offline packages. So I tried to do that. And then I just got a kernel paddock when I tried to boot it. The installer image stays. Yeah. And I've no idea what happened. So then I just got the network image and that seemed to work. And it was just ultimately fine, except it didn't want a dual boot. It's the bottom line. It really like really didn't want a dual boot because I had Zubuntu obviously on this XPS that I installed it on. And it's not that hard to reinstall and copy my dot files back over. But I thought, well, let's just try and dual boot it. And I booted the installer and like, it's really quite hard to tell it where you want to install it, isn't it? Like, you've got to work quite hard for it to not just wipe your whole disk and put butter FS here and there and do what it wants. I got a bit confused. I actually did install it twice

6:11because I installed it to an SSD that already had proxmox on it that I'd put on the laptop. I was installing it to to mark about. And it had the existing LVM for proxmox, which is admittedly when you don't use ZFS for proxmox is quite messy under the hood. You don't get presented with that. But so I went through the installer and I didn't realize that if you click the button that's at the bottom for guided setup, it will just go through and blitz everything. So the first time around, it presented me with like a list of about 50 changes to the LVM because I was just using the existing partitioning structure and I was very, very confused and then I remembered. So the second time around, I wiped the disk to blank and it presented me with a kind of standard EFI route partition setup. But it was only the second time around I realized that if you press that button at the bottom, it takes you through what I would consider to be what should be the default for

7:14an installer, which is I'm doing this. Do you want this and give you the options. And then on top of that, there was a manual advanced partitioning section as well. So just felt really like if I was a new user coming to this now, admittedly, I wouldn't install Tomboweed, but there was just too many elements for me. Yeah, I mean, I've criticized the Fedora installer before, but this is next level advanced. Like you really have to know what you're doing or you have to be just willing to give it the whole disk, I suppose. But maybe that's the argument for making it hard to change it because by default, it's just going to wipe the whole disk, which arguably I suppose people might want to do, but I've always been one for dual boating where possible, whether that is with Windows or your existing Linux distro. And Ubuntu does it so well, Joe, right? I mean, I haven't used the Flutter one as much recently, but certainly subiquity, you would have, you know, I'm going to put

8:15Windows on the left here and Ubuntu on the right here, and you could click a line in the middle and drag it left and right to prioritize which OS got disk space or carve them up equally. And it was just very clear. This just didn't feel that user-friendly to me. And were you using a Garma, Jay? If you mean the one in the browser, then yes. Right. Yeah. See, I was using the old one which looks more like subiquity or the Fedora installer. Well, the Fedora installer is running in a Firefox window now too. Ah, okay. Yeah, but it does seem, I don't know, slicker somehow. It's a lot more responsive. They don't actually run Firefox. It's like an embedded thing. Right. Well, a little bit of under the hood knowledge, which I garnered is that they decided to move away from yes. So yes used to be very, very all-encompassing install and configure. And then initially they were moving away from debust to a kind of HTTP interface for the installer. And it was much more coupled with cockpit. But now the installer is a separate

9:19thing which they work on. And then the idea is that you will replace yes post install with cockpit. But it does seem very in flux. There are some blog posts you can read for a roadmap. But I don't know whether this is a good moment that we've picked to be in the middle of that process. Yeah. But then what's actually got it installed? It was not too bad. It was just an XFC desktop. Everything was where it should be. It was running Wayland. And I tell you, it has improved markedly since I first tried that about six months ago when they announced it. I think it was in beta at the time. It was a usable XFC desktop. I installed all the stuff that I wanted. Zipper is pretty intuitive. Zipper search. Zipper install. Zipper update. That sort of thing. It was just uneventful really. I managed to just do what I wanted to do. I got my Bluetooth headphones connected, connected to Wi-Fi. It was just, you know, a pretty average distro,

10:21really. Did you have the Wayland session by default then? Did you do anything to choose that? Was that just what it gave you? That's just what it gave me. Right. Now you had said Chris that you can get an X session going. And so I tried to do that with limited success, shall we say. First of all, I found some instructions, did what it said, and rebooted, and then there was just no option. Then I found some other instructions. And it said, like, do you want to get rid of this thing, that thing, that thing, you know, all the components. So I kept was going yes, enter, yes, enter, you know, why enter, why enter, about 50 times. And then it pulled down a load of replacements for the stuff that I'd got rid of, rebooted, and then it wouldn't log in. And there was no X session. It was just Wayland. So I'd completely broken it. And at that point, I gave up. Did you accidentally follow an AI guide? I don't think so. It was somewhere in the

11:21season documentation. I mean, granted I didn't look as hard as I should have. But I think I was following official documentation. I don't know. It was the opposite on time of EDC. It didn't give me Wayland. It just gave me X at the beginning. So you're telling me that the rolling release version A has the old installer. And B gives you an X version of XFCE instead of the Wayland one. Yes, I am. And this is very susur. Let me say, what kind of topsy turvy world is Susa living in? Well, I know. And so I would look it up. And I realized that there is a meta package, whatever the zipper equivalent of that's proper name is XFCE for dash session, dash Wayland, dash experimental. So I pulled that in from zipper, logged out. And then in the session manager, there was a choice actually then of four. So there was X 11 XFCE, Wayland XFCE experimental, lab WC on its own. And also I SWM, which I think Susa just installs even if it's just a server

12:28environment. And as you uncheck it. So the Wayland session that I got, I don't know about you, is very similar to how I was messing about with Debian unstable about six months ago, which we talked about a little bit, lab WC is the compositor rather than the new XF LM4, I think it's called that is being worked on. When I looked at the process tree, I did look to the environment variable, the XDG session type was Wayland, but the process tree was lab WC for the compositor. So yeah, what kind of topsy-turvy world is Susa living in Joe? It's a very good question. Well, let me tell you, things were not much better on the gnome side of the house. So I booted into what seemed like a pretty normal looking gnome desktop. And I did what any self-respecting gnome user does and completely ignored the command line and opened gnome software. I clicked on the updates tab and there were updates, so I installed them and it rebooted and it

13:33created many, many butter FS snapshots in the process. I thought, right, that's great. Everything is up to date. I can start playing with this. I'm going to go and install some stuff. So into the explore tab of gnome software. And then underneath the explore tab, I had available apps. Now every single one of them has a check mark next to them to say that it's installed. And no other software is available for me to install on the system. So I went into the hamburger menu and went to software repositories and realized that by default, the open-suza leap software repository was disabled out of the box. So I enabled the software repository and closed the pop-up window and did a refresh software repositories in gnome software, which did nothing, absolutely nothing. So then I thought, I'm going to have to dig out the command line. So I did a zipper update. And it did pull down some new information about the latest repositories went back into

14:35gnome software. Still nothing. Right. Did you try to preinstall or dusty or whatever it was you were looking for? Yes. And that worked absolutely fine. Right. But the gnome software integration completely broken. So here's a fun thing Gary. They are writing a new package manager GUI called Merlin, spelled M-Y-R-L-Y-N. And that is also, I can't fully work it out from reading because it's in flux, part of the deprecation of YAST to split out into what they are calling the agama cockpit Merlin stack. So whether or not they support gnome software. Now having said that, they should, right, because it's the desktop environment software manager. So regardless of what tooling is being added in, that should work better, right? Surely. But they also have the choice not to bundle it out of the box if they don't support it, but equally they bundle no alternative GUI software manager. So as someone who just wants to install this and try and use it

15:43without opening the command line and learning zipper, I just can't do anything. Well, this is the interesting thing because if you visit the official page for Merlin, it says there is no official package available for open susur leap 16. So your guess is as good as mine. To be fair, Adam, before you write the next paragraph of your angry email, we are probably hitting things in a slightly rocky state. Then don't release it. Don't release it if it's broken. I'm sorry, it's just terrible. This is what beaters are for in alphas and a bunch who's got their snapshot releases where if you want to actively help them develop the distro, you can go and get one of the snapshot releases or the daily image or whatever, but even an interim doesn't have broken stuff. And this may be wrong or maybe an outdated view, but in my mind, leap is just the snapshot of something that is stable and it should be able to install it and it just works.

16:47Yeah. And this just feels like no one has ever looked at it. There has been zero QA. Is that cusser all in on KDE? Oh, no, they're not though, are they? No, because if you visit the main portal for Susie as a desktop, which is where new users would land as a kind of general search, they state that they officially support three desktop environments with equal weight, GNOME, Plasma and XFCE. The other space is that as far as I'm aware, on the immutable site, there's been a little bit of controversy because Plasma there is support as is stated to be alpha in support compared to beta. I've just gone to get.opensis.org slash desktop and it says many desktops, three by default, Plasma 5, XFCE 4 and GNOME 3. GNOME 3 is not a release anymore. Hasn't been called that for a while. Was it 50 now? Yeah, it's this name 50 or something now. But yeah, that tells me everything I

17:52need to know that the attention name is getting. For the website for that matter. Yeah. Well, I tried to install YAST, right? Because that didn't seem to be installed by default. So I installed YAST and then it didn't show up in the menu. So I just randomly asked from the command line and I got this call to me of YAST. Ah, yeah, you see. So it does feel like we are hitting shift about because officially you're not supposed to use YAST on Leap 16. But again, on the website, YAST, the best choice for the user. So tell me if I'm not supposed to use it, why is it on the website? I mean, when I was in the Ubuntu Touch project, we certainly had things on the website that you weren't supposed to use. Now a couple of days ago, when it was clear that we weren't having the best time with this, I said, are we sure we want to do this? We don't want to just go on air and shit all over it. And you all said, no, it's fine. It's fine. What happened to that? I thought you were going to just say the same thing I have. Like once you got it going,

18:55it was just like, yeah, you installed what you wanted and it was just fine. So to be fair, what I will say is that I did obviously get to a desktop with XFCE. It's much more welcoming than the Debian install of XFCE, for example, which is still, you know, status bar at the top, the default package desktop environment wallpaper, the fun rendering looks like bum basically. Like it's more polished in that regard. And I came away from it thinking there's lots of good ideas, but it doesn't grab me in the way that other distro tests that we've done have, because each element I look at, you know, for example, ButterFS snapshots automatically is sort of compelling, but the grub menu is full of them for every package transaction that I've done. I think that should be nested one menu down. And also, if I wanted that, because I listened to

19:57our favorite partner podcast, I wouldn't be choosing ButterFS personally if I wanted a copy on right file system. And if I wanted rollback ability, I'd be much more attracted to an image-based atomic distro. And that's generally how I felt looking at all the things. I don't want a monolithic, gooey manager for everything. Now, as it happens, they are getting rid of that as well. But each element, I wouldn't look at it and go, this is awful, but I'd also look at it and go, this is a good idea, but it's a bit like this other thing, which I probably would prefer to use. Yeah. And I think it was similar for me. It just felt very disjointed. Like there are just different teams building different projects. They're all amalgamated together in the distray. But none of it felt very integrated. Like sure, once I had realized that name software is just broken, and I ziffer installed staff and I installed flatpack. It did feel like using any other distray,

20:57but I just had to ignore all of the sharp edges. This is it, right? Because we do have cross-distro tooling. So of course, I could get things from flatpack. And we've discussed before that the distribution you run starts to become less important. But I also had these paper cuts. I left the machine for 10 minutes. The screen locked. I came back, I pressed enter, and it was just a black screen with a mouse pointer. So I was like, okay, fine, I've had this happen. I'll drop to a TTY, control or F1, TTY, great logged in. I tried to do system CTL restart like DM. It said, elevating to root, prompting for password with polk it, I think. But there was no prompt. So I think it was trying to draw a graphical window for me to put my administrator password in, but it had no GUI to draw the window to put it in. And then after a while, it just timed out and said, well, you didn't put the password in. I was like, well, you need to give me someone to put the password, don't you? So very strange. And that's what's not helping here, you see. It's

22:03the additional paper cuts. Once I had it running, it was fine. Another time I went to shut down, and the Butterfess snapshot got stuck. So I got in that awful system D loop of, you know, wait one minute, 30 seconds for these three services to send a signal that they finished, that then went to three minutes, four and a half minutes, seven minutes. And I was at 11 minutes. And in the end, I had to do a hard shutdown. I'm not going to sit around all day while it does it. So I don't know where the tumbleweed went against me there, but the fact that Gary's saying the same things and Joe didn't have the best time. I'm really sorry. You can throw accusations of, oh, you picked the wrong hardware or you obviously picked a bad time, but that's three people. It does feel a little bit difficult to make your way out of that fully positively. Well, and I picked the most generic platform I could, a VM. So it's the most positive thing we can say about this is it made us grateful for our current distros. Well, I think I said in the chat, it made me grateful for how generic the Linux desktop

23:12has become. As in once I'd gotten beyond all the paper cuts and I had just installed the applications I liked, it felt like anything else. I think it's falling in a strange place for me because, you know, if we didn't have atomic distros and we didn't have arch Linux, a curated rolling release, because let's be fair, they do a periodic snapshot, which they do test properly. They have a security team. It's a widely used distribution, especially in somewhere like Germany, and in SAP, for some reason, they have that market lined up. If you want a corporate deploy of a Linux distribution in Germany, from what I gather, Susa is very, very popular. But for me, if I want a rolling release distribution with snapshot and rollback, I wouldn't choose it anymore. And maybe, you know, that's why they are also looking into the atomic version with the same sort of layout because they know it too. Well, I suppose we've answered the question then

24:16as to why we never talk about Susa. We did give it a go, at least we gave it a go, but it hasn't grabbed me. I'm sorry. Right. Well, on that really positive note, we should probably get out of here then. We'll be back in a couple of weeks, but until then, I've been Joe. I've been Chris. I've been Gary. What did you all do wrong? See you later.