American pancakes met blauwe bessen en maple syrup.

The openSUSE News article Freedom Means Knowing What’s Installed highlights a critical benefit of using openSUSE and other Linux distributions; complete system transparency!

This principle isn’t just a philosophical pillar of open-source software, it’s a practical advantage.

Linux is transparent by design and this is true for really all aspects, including the installed software that people get from their distribution. All software is bundled in packages, and these packages can be inspected.

If you ever wondered what that file /usr/bin/dispcal is that you found on your system, you can query the RPM database what package it belongs to. You can use the following in the command line:

sh@meteor:~> rpm -qf /usr/bin/dispcal
argyllcms-3.3.0-1.3.x86_64

So it belongs to the argyllcms package, a color management system. But if you don’t like using the command line, you can also use QDirStat, which is a graphical disk usage utility that’s short for Qt Directory Statistics.

After a After a sudo zypper install qdirstat, we can run the following: qdirstat /usr showing the disk usage in the /usr subtree

Look at the details of the panel on the right side: For files in system directories, it automatically queries the RPM database and shows what package the file belongs to. You can browse through the directory tree and do that for each file that you are interested in.

But it also has a mode to show only unpackaged files, i.e. files that do not belong to any installed software package:

Next command, let’s go with qdirstat unpkg:/usr/bin. This shows all unpackaged files in /usr/bin

There is /usr/bin/qdirstat - okay, I built that from source myself and installed it manually to /usr/bin; that’s alright. But what on earth is /usr/bin/trustmebro? Last modification date from yesterday, too? This is suspicious and is someting to investigate further. It might be a good idea to remove the execute permissions from it and quarantine it, i.e. to move it away to another directory because it might be something malicious.

What packages do I even have installed, and how much disk space does each of them use? QDirStat can show that, too:

Let’s take the next step and run qdirstat pkg:/, which shows the disk usage per package for all our installed packages.

These are just some examples of what the Linux introspection mechanisms can show you about the system. Linux is not hiding anything from you; if you want to know, all information is readily available.

You can dive deeper into the tool and its features by visiting the QDirStat GitHub repo. For more technical details, see the Package View Documentation and the Unpackaged Files View Documentation.

This is part of a series on Upgrade to Freedom where we offer reasons to transition from Windows to Linux.

The Upgrade to Freedom campaign exists to remind users that better, community-driven operating systems to Microsoft Windows do exist and that there are alternatives that don’t compromise transparency, security or user trust.

As headlines highlight Windows missteps and questionable design decisions, now is the perfect time to explore what Linux distributions like openSUSE’s have to offer.

Users on most Linux distributions won’t wake up one day to find an unexplained system folder quietly added to their hard drive.

People won’t be told after the fact that deleting an empty folder called inetpub somehow exposed their system to attackers. And they won’t be left scrambling through news articles, forum threads, and vague documentation just to understand how a simple action led to a security risk and is now their problem to solve.

That’s because openSUSE is built differently. Its changes are transparent and trackable.

When a system changes, the user will know it. Updates are logged. Packages are versioned. Every file is traceable to the package it came from. If something gets added to the filesystem, users can see exactly why it was added.

System security with openSUSE is built on principle; not on secret folders. People won’t find out after deleting an unused directory that their system became vulnerable. In the openSUSE world, if something is essential, you’ll know it upfront, and it’ll be tied to a clearly installed package like apache2 or nginx.

Release teams don’t assume people want a web server or developer tools unless they explicitly install them. For people who want them, they will be prompted, informed, and given configuration options. They won’t get system directories or services that are unrelated to the actual needs of their system.

Why does this work a newcomer to Linux might ask? Because the community has oversight and keeps the system designers accountable. Every package, every change, and every system behavior in openSUSE is subject to community review and open discussion. This is why software release life cycles and testing are the norm and not the exception. If something odd shows up in an update, someone will notice and ask why before it lands on their machine.

There has never been a more optimal time to switch your system to a Linux distribution like openSUSE than now. It saves users money, extends e-waste from going to landfills and recycling centers, empowers creative professionals, gamers and more.

Download openSUSE Leap, Slowroll, Tumbleweed, Kalpa or Aeon and see what you’ve been missing. What are you waiting for? Make the switch today.

This is part of a series on Upgrade to Freedom where we offer reasons to transition from Windows to Linux.

Messaging around the end of Windows 10 support has been loud, urgent and, unfortunately, irresponsibly narrow.

In a recent article titled ‘Microsoft’s Free Upgrade Offer For 500 Million Windows Users,’, the advice given to users whose PCs don’t meet the requirements for Windows 11 states to recycle or landfill the device.

Let’s pause right there.

Rather than encourage users to reuse perfectly functional hardware with open-source alternatives like openSUSE, the suggestion to discard it not only perpetuates environmental harm, it completely ignores the thriving world of Linux distributions. This Forbes article promotes a false choice between buying new hardware or getting rid of it.

The upgrade eligibility criteria exclude hundreds of millions of PCs. TPM 2.0, Secure Boot and other artificial requirements have nothing to do with a system’s actual performance. What these new features do accomplish is force users to believe they need to buy new hardware rather than seek alternatives.

But these computers still work.

Recycling and landfills should be the last resort; not the default recommendation. The environmental toll of electronic waste is well documented. Replacing a laptop every few years because of arbitrary OS restrictions is not sustainable as highlighted by Joanna Murzyn at the 2024 KDE Akademy conference.

The open-source community has spent decades creating operating systems that run fast, are secure and function stable on modern and older machines alike. Look at openSUSE’s Leap, Slowroll, Tumbleweed, Kalpa, Aeon; these are just a few of the powerful Linux distributions people can install to breathe new life into their hardware. There are no activation keys; there are no hidden costs, and there are no surveillance features like Recall.

Linux has a different approach. It values privacy. Its code is open for a reason: transparency. It’s reviewed by a global community and supported by open-source companies and not tied to corporate lock-in. Security updates arrive quickly without requiring a purchase or subscription. Most importantly; you stay in control of your device.

With openSUSE and other Linux distributions, users can:

• Keep using their hardware long past Microsoft’s expiration dates
• Install professional-grade software at no cost
• Customize and control their computing environment

The Forbes article paints a bleak future for Windows 10 by declaring peoples devices ineligible and obsolete. This is misleading and irresponsible. People should not throw away their working computer and should settle on an OS that upgrades them to freedom rather than filling landfills and recycling centers.

Download an openSUSE flavor today at get.opensuse.org and discover an OS that respects your hardware, your privacy and your freedom.

This is part of a series on Upgrade to Freedom where we offer reasons to transition from Windows to Linux.

Dear Tumbleweed users and rolling release aficionados,

Another week, another fresh batch of snapshots for openSUSE Tumbleweed! Week 15 of 2025 brought in three solid snapshots — 20250403, 20250405, and 20250409 — with a healthy mix of desktop polish, toolchain improvements, and a sprinkle of bug fixes across the board. Let’s take a quick dive into the highlights!

Snapshot 20250403: KDE Plasma 6.3.4 – The Polish Continues

The entire KDE Plasma 6 stack received a minor bump to version 6.3.4, bringing incremental improvements and bugfixes across the board:

• Plasma Desktop, KWin, System Settings, Discover, and all your favorite Plasma companions now reflect this version.
• This update targets stability, performance, and visual consistency. No flashy new features, but plenty of refinement!

Other notables:

• libvirt 11.2.0 and QEMU 9.2.3 help keep your virtualization experience top-notch.
• mozilla-nss 3.109 landed, updating core TLS/SSL libraries.
• Python world saw updates like python-libvirt-python, ensuring compatibility with the new libvirt version.

Snapshot 20250405: Core Stack Evolves

This snapshot was all about the plumbing:

• btrfsprogs was bumped again to 6.14, continuing the evolution of the default Tumbleweed filesystem.
• libsolv and libzypp received updates, which help fine-tune package resolution and improve zypper performance and behavior.
• dracut received another SUSE-specific update, ensuring smoother initramfs generation.
• For devs and scripters, m4, ed, and python-gobject got modest version updates.
• sdbootutil was updated twice this week (again in 20250409), reflecting ongoing work around bootloader and Secure Boot handling.

Snapshot 20250409: Gnome Touch-ups and Qt6.9 Lands

This snapshot was a heavy hitter, especially for desktop users:

• Mozilla Firefox 137.0 brings the latest browser enhancements, performance tweaks, and security patches.
• The GNOME stack saw refinements:
  • Updates to Gnome Control Center, Gnome Keyring, Remote Desktop, and more.
  • These likely align with GNOME 48 maintenance polishing.
• GTK4 4.18.4 and libportal, libsoup, glib2 updates continue improving GNOME app responsiveness and interoperability.

Big win for Qt fans:

• Qt 6.9.0 landed across the board — including all its modules from qt6-base to qt6-webengine. Expect compatibility improvements and performance boosts in Qt-based apps.

Other highlights:

• Mesa 25.0.3 and drivers updated again — always a treat for gamers and Wayland users.
• PHP 8.4.5 landed, bumping up both the interpreter and the Apache module.
• Kernel 6.14.1 and firmware updates bring the latest hardware enablement.
• poppler 25.04.0, ImageMagick, GIMP, and FFmpeg 7.1.1 updates round out a rich multimedia set.

Tumbleweed’s Rolling Momentum

This week showed the strength of Tumbleweed’s integration work: frequent Plasma and GNOME refinements, Qt and toolchain updates, and a healthy dose of backend upgrades.

As always: zypper dup is your friend. Roll forward, not backward!

Stay tuned, and until next time: keep rollin’!

Time flies and more than a month has passed since the announcement of Agama 12. Fortunately the YaST Team has not been idle and we have a new version of Agama to present. Say hello to Agama 13, including some additions to the web interface and many improvements for unattended installations.

Setting the hostname​

Let's start with a feature that some people would consider rather basic or, at least, something easy to implement - the ability to set a name for the machine (ie. hostname) during installation. The naked truth is that it took us some time to open that can of worms because it is a rather complicated topic.

First of all, there is nothing like a unique hostname since a machine can have different names depending on the network interface used to interact with it. Moreover, those names can be static or transient and there are several mechanisms to set or modify them with relatively complex precedence rules in several situations.

One of those mentioned mechanisms, already available at previous versions of the Agama-Live installation media, was specifying the hostname= boot argument. In Agama 13 we extended that with some limited support to configure the hostname at the Agama configuration (to be used by the command-line interface and during unattended installation) and with a simple dedicated section at the web user interface.

Hostname settings are not expected to remain at its own separate section of the user interface for long. We plan to integrate it in another section (likely a new one called "System") in future releases of Agama.

Installing on LVM​

Another feature that got a preliminary user interface at Agama 13 is the ability to install using LVM (Logical Volume Manager).

As you may know, it was already possible to define LVM volume groups and logical volumes at the storage section of the Agama configuration that can be used both in unattended installation and in the command-line interface. Agama 13 provides a first integration of that functionality into the web user interface.

The new interface is still a bit rough around the edges but already allows to define one or more volume groups with any number of logical volumes. Agama will automatically calculate all the final sizes both for the logical volumes and for the partitions needed to host the LVM physical volumes.

Register extensions from the SUSE Customer Center​

The possibilities offered by default by any (open)SUSE Linux distribution can be extended adding extra repositories. In the case of enterprise-grade products like SLES that means activating add-ons and extensions, which may be subject to some registration process before being available for installation.

For that purpose, the product configuration at Agama 13 was extended with the option addon. The following example shows how that could be used to register the High Availability extension that can be added to any installation of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server thanks to the SUSE Customer Center.

{
  "product": {
    "id": "SLES",
    "registrationCode": "<CODE>",
    "addons": [
      {
        "id": "sle-ha",
        "registrationCode": "<CODE>"
      }
    ]
  }
}

As you already know, adding a feature to the Agama configuration implies it can be used during unattended installation and also on interactive installations using the command-line interface. But it does not imply such a feature will be automatically available at the web user interface of Agama.

In the case of registering extensions, we are already working to make it possible via the web UI for Agama 14, expected to be released by the end of April. That is not the case for another of the features we recently added to the Agama configuration.

Selecting individual packages to install​

Similar to the product section, Agama 13 also extends the software one with new possibilities. In addition to the previously available list of patterns, now it is also possible to specify a list of individual packages, not necessarily contained on any pattern.

{
  "software": {
    "patterns": ["gnome_desktop"],
    "packages": ["vim"],
  }
}

As mentioned before, there are no plans to add such a fine-grained software selection to the web user interface of Agama.

Support for AutoYaST-style URLs​

As you may know, one of the goals of Agama is to provide a seamless transition from AutoYaST. That implies being able to read the configuration for the unattended installation from the same locations that AutoYaST can handle.

The configuration is usually indicated by a URL that is passed to the installer. But AutoYaST URLs are one of a kind - they support all kind of non-standard schemes like device:// or label://, each of them with their own AutoYaST-specific semantic.

Agama now supports URLs starting with device:, usb:, label:, HD:, DVD: and cd:. You can know more about those special schemas at the corresponding page of the Agama documentation site. Support for well-known URL schemas (like file:, http:, etc.) is still implemented using curl under the hood.

Automated search of unattended configuration​

And talking about searching, you may know that AutoYaST is able to find the auto-installation profile at several predefined locations, even if no URL was explicitly specified by the user. As part of our effort to make Agama an almost-direct replacement for AutoYaST we implemented a very similar functionality.

If Agama is started in automatic mode but no configuration (profile) is specified, Agama will automatically search for it in the same pre-defined locations used by AutoYaST. In those cases, Agama expects a file named autoinst.jsonnet, autoinst.json or autoinst.xml (in that order) to be located on:

• The root of a file system named OEMDRV.
• Or the root (/) of the installation environment.

The first file found is used as the profile, starting the installation right away.

Deploy files during installation​

Going further into the role of Agama as an AutoYaST successor, you may know that AutoYaST allows to deploy complete configuration files using the <files /> element. Just like scripts, it is possible to embed the file content in the profile or, if preferred, to retrieve it from a remote location.

Of course, we decided Agama should offer the same functionality that you can see in action in the following example.

{
   "product": {
      "id": "Tumbleweed",
   },
   "user": {
      "fullName": "beloved TUX",
      "password": "tux",
      "userName": "tux"
   },
   "root": {
     "password": "linux"
   },
   "files": [
      {
        destination: "/home/tux/scripts/test.sh",
        content: |||
          #!/usr/bin/bash
          systemctl start multipathd.socket multipathd.service
        |||,
        permissions: "755",
        user: "tux",
        group: "users"
      },
      {
        destination: "/root/test2.md",
        url: "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/example/a_file.md"
      }
   ]
}

We keep moving​

We are already working at Agama 14, that will provide new functionality and will improve some of the features introduced at Agama 13. Meanwhile do not hesitate to give Agama a try using our latest Live ISO images.

As always can contact us at the Agama project at GitHub and our #yast channel at Libera.chat. See you soon!

We are excited to announce the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2025 Logo Competition!

A logo is more than just a design—it represents the spirit, identity, and energy of the event. Every year, the summit logo reflects the unique, diverse, and dynamic communities of the host country.

This time, the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2025 will be held in Faridabad, India, bringing together open-source enthusiasts, developers, and contributors from across Asia. We invite creative minds to design an outstanding logo for this year.

The competition is now open! As a token of appreciation, the winning design receives a special prize from the summit committee.

Contest Rules & Guidelines

Licensing

• The logo must be licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0, allowing the openSUSE community to use it freely without needing to provide attribution each time, as typically required by the license, if the logo is selected.
• More details on licensing

Originality

• The design must be original and must not include any third-party materials.

Design Requirements

• Formats: Submit both monochrome and color versions of the logo.
• File Format: The design must be in SVG format.
• Theme: The logo should reflect openSUSE, open-source values, and the diverse Asian community.

Avoid Using

• Brand names or trademarks of any kind.
• Inappropriate, offensive, or discriminatory imagery.
• Religious, political, or nationalist symbols.
• Weapons, violence, drugs, or alcohol-related elements.

Branding & Guidelines

• The logo should adhere to the openSUSE Project Trademark Guidelines.
• You may also refer to openSUSE branding guidelines (optional).

How to Submit

Send your design to opensuseasia-summit@googlegroups.com with the following details:

Email Subject: openSUSE.Asia Summit 2025 Logo Design - [Your Name] Attachments:

1. Vector File: The logo in SVG format ONLY (Refer to template in Figure 1).
2. Bitmap File: A PNG version (minimum 256x256 pixels).
3. Design Philosophy: A short TXT or PDF document explaining your concept.
4. File Size: Ensure all files are under 512 KB.

Figure 1. Sample SVG Template for the logo

The openSUSE.Asia Summit Committee will carefully review all submissions. Note: Final decision will be made by the committee and may not necessarily be the highest-voted design.

Tip: Use Inkscape, a free and open-source vector design tool!

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: 10 June 2025
• Winner Announcement: 20 June 2025