What is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed?

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a cutting-edge Linux distribution from the OpenSUSE team. It uses the latest versions of software applications and the Linux kernel for those who want to see what will be coming up in other Linux distributions in 6-months to a year or more from the time that they appear in Tumbleweed. This means that there are bugs; lots of them. Things break, This is the price that you pay for having the very cutting edge or software technology.

What did Bryan Lunduke actually say?

Let’s break down his complaints. There are only two.

• SUSE Studio
• YaST (ugly, cumbersome, hard to use, stupid, bloated)

The first complaint is an application stack that doesn’t actually have anything directly to do with Tumbleweed. I never used it. It was going by the wayside when I started using OpenSUSE as my daily OS of choice. The source code is still out there and maybe it should be forked and brought back to life. I don’t know. I can’t argue with this point because it is a red herring and has nothing to do the OpenSUSE Tumbleweed distribution.

The second list of complaints is pretty vague, but his complaint is basically that YaST has issues that are causing it to bring does the entire distribution as a whole.

What is YaST?

YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) is a set of system management tools that are grouped together in a single management application called YaST though they can be installed and run separately as needed.

The modules allow the user to easily control most administrative functions that might be needed. Not all of the modules are the same though. Some such as the printer and scanner modules suck. Other modules like the Software Management module are great. I consider this to be on par with Debian’s Synaptic package management tool which is freaking amazing. If unevenness in the quality of the modules is the reason why he dislikes it so much, then it’s not a completely wrong reason but it’s not a really good one either.

I say that it’s a given that some of the modules are out of date or need a fresh new rewrite, but that’s not specifically what he is saying. He keeps his complaints vague and oddly personal. I’m not privy to much of the inner-workings of the OpenSUSE distribution but I’ve seen from social media that there is some bad blood there between him and folks in OpenSUSE and I really hope this isn’t just a rant against them instead of really against the distribution.

With that aside, let’s talk about the real issue with YaST and any GUI based configuration tool. It is yet another level of abstraction away from actually working with the operating system. For example, YaST has an module called HTTP Server. If you run it, it will set up Apache and any modules like PHP for you and will give you some basic options for tuning it without actually needing to work with the command line or configuration files directly. If someone told me that they had been a system administrator for 5 years but they had only ever used YaST, I wouldn’t hire them because many times things break and they can’t be fixed with YaST. Tools like YaST should mainly be a time saver not a replacement for good configuration and I think that’s what it is currently.

Even with my own genuine complaints above, they don’t really co-inside with Bryan Lunduke’s complains (it’s ugly, cumbersome, hard to use, stupid, and bloated) because I can’t see all of that. It’s no more ugly than any other tool (besides real nerds care about function over form). Granted, some of the modules are cumbersome and hard to use, but not all of them. It’s “stupid, stupid and it’s stupid” what the heck is that supposed to mean? Use your words Lunduke! Don’t just emote. “It’s bloated.” There are currently 183 total YaST modules. Many will never be used by an end user because they are only used during installation. However if you were to install them all, it would take up 176MiB which would average out to .96MiB per module. There are some required Ruby libraries that I’m not taking into account here, but this really isn’t what I would call bloat. You can even uninstall the modules that you don’t want without causing a huge fuss.

Let’s Wrap Up

Bryan Lunduke is wrong when he says that OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is one of the worst distros out right now. He is wrong when he says that YaST is dragging down the entire distro. YaST has problems, but they aren’t what he says they are.

Quatre instantanés openSUSE Tumbleweed ont été publiés cette semaine. Ils fournissent un noyau Linux, des versions du framework KDE ainsi que python-setuptools pour offrir aux développeurs un grand nombre de nouveaux paquets upstream.

L'instantané Tumbleweed 20190423, le plus récent, fournissait un nouveau cups-filters 1.22.5 qui modifiait un appel Ghostscript afin de corriger le nombre de pages pour qu'il fonctionne avec Ghostscript 9.27 et les versions ultérieures. Le package de décodeur AV1 dav1d 0.2.2 apporte une augmentation de vitesse de 4 à 6% pour le décodage MSAC (Multi Slot Amplitude Coding) avec SSE. Le progiciel du noyau a été mis à jour en 20190409 et a mis à jour le fichier du micrologiciel pour les firmwares Intel Bluetooth et Marvell. Des traductions indonésiennes ont été faites dans le paquet libstorage-ng 4.1.112. Ruby 2.6.3 a mis à jour la version Unicode vers la version 12.1 bêta pour ajouter la prise en charge de New Japanese Era “令 和” (Reiwa). Les autres packages mis à jour dans l'instantané étaient perl-DateTime 1.51, perl-DateTime-TimeZone 2.35, python-parso 0.4.0, python-qt5 5.12.1 et rdma-core 23.0. Selon l'outil d'évaluation de Tumbleweed, cet instantané a actuellement une cote de 89.

Mesa 19.0.2 présentait quelques correctifs pour radeon, radv et v3d dans l'instantané 20190420. Quelques autres paquets ont été mis à jour dans cet instantané, tels que kipi-plugins 5.9.1, qui était la première version autonome en dehors de digikam. Selon l'évaluateur Tumbleweed, cet instantané affiche actuellement une côte de 97.

Les contributeurs de KDE ont proposé de nombreuses corrections et bibliothèques d'addons à Qt avec la mise à jour de Frameworks 5.57.0 dans l'instantané 20190419. Le framework d'interface utilisateur légère de KDE pour les applications mobiles et convergentes, appelée Kirigami, comportait la plupart des mises à jour, ainsi que KIO et les fonctions de gestion de fichiers qu'elle fournit aux utilisateurs de Konqi. Python-setuptools 41.0.0 est un autre package destiné aux développeurs qui est arrivé dans l'instantané. Le package supprime la prise en charge de la spécification d’un codage à l’aide d’une directive «coding:» dans l’en-tête du fichier. Lors de l'analyse des fichiers setup.cfg, setuptools exige désormais que les fichiers soient encodés en UTF-8. Java-11-openjdk mis à jour en 11.0.3.0 a ajouté des scénarios de test pour une analyse syntaxique japonaise et a implémenté plusieurs correctifs de sécurité. Cet instantané affichait une note stable de 97.

L'instantané qui a commencé la semaine, 20190418, affichait une note stable de 94. L'instantané a mis à jour ImageMagick vers la version 7.0.8.40 et résolvait plusieurs problèmes suivis sur github. Le paquet emacs 26.2 est maintenant compatible avec la dernière version 11.0 du standard Unicode et des modifications ont été apportées aux modes et paquets spécialisés dans Emacs 26.2 Dired: la commande ‘Z’ d’un nom de répertoire compresse désormais l’ensemble de ses fichiers. Le noyau Linux 5.0.8 comportait des correctifs pour les plate-formes arm et autres. Une des mises à jour du noyau a corrigé les régulateurs du codec audio du processeur AM335x Evaluation Module. Les autres packages mis à jour dans l'instantané étaient hwdata 0.322, sshfs 3.5.2 et yast2 4.2.0, nécessaires pour charger des frameworks de tests d'intégration.

Tags: opensuse

Usually, in my workshop I am listening to the great radio station Bayern 2 (Yeah for public law media). But sometimes you just need to listen to nice classic english punk music, speed folk or (the one and only) Lemmy and friends.

For that I was looking for a so called boom box to stream to from my mobile, simple, dirty and loud. Good that I was a proud awardee at the HiFiBerry Maker Contest 2017 with my TeakEar build, where I won a nice set of a RaspberryPi Zero with a little HiFiBerry MiniAmp, coming with all what is needed to make that working. That should be enough to get proper punk sound in the workshop - and escape the boring normal commercial boom boxes all around.

At a flee market I found a great case for that - exactly one of these that were in the classrooms of my school giving the unbanning gong at the end of each lesson. Nicely with the original non-color textile hiding the speaker and nicely done bended and veneered wood for the elegance.

A great fit for my usecase.

Two 3.3 inch Visaton fullrange speaker are mounted in simple closed chassis. The Raspi with the Amp is mounted between them. All is mounted on a back plate that fits the school speaker chassis. Boombox ready.

From a software perspective, it is there is just a Raspbian running that is configured to act as a bluetooth audio device for my mobile.

I think it is a nice addition to my workshop, with a great ease of use since it auto-connects to my mobile. Does it sound great? Oh no, not ..really. Is it loud? Well, yes, loud enough to not get in trouble with the neighbors. Given it’s size, it is actually impresse.

Surely Lemmy would be fine to play Rock’n Roll through it :)

The only downsize of the whole thing is that it disturbs the radio reception quite a bit, so it is really either or. Any hints how to reduce that?

Weblate 3.6.1 has been released today. It is a bugfix release fixing several issues reported after the 3.6 release.

Full list of changes:

• Improved handling of monolingual Xliff files.
• Fixed digest notifications in some corner cases.
• Fixed addon script error alert.
• Fixed generating MO file for monolingual PO files.
• Fixed display of uninstalled checks.
• Indicate administered projects on project listing.
• Allow update to recover from missing VCS repository.

If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions.

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Turris, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Filed under: Debian English SUSE Weblate

LeoCAD is an application that I use somewhat frequently. It is available for Linux, Windows and even Mac but I don’t have a Windows or Mac machine of which to compare to Linux. I have written about the joys of using LeoCAD before if you are interested in that blathering and at that time I used the … Continue reading Distracted by LeoCAD Once Again on openSUSE Linux →

A Gigglescore is a ratio score of price to performance for single-board-computers like the LattePanda or Raspberry Pi. A lower Gigglescore means a better value for the money. A higher one is worse. You can see more here: https://gigglescore.com/

My LattePanda:

sudo ./benchmark.sh 149
   Repository 'openSUSE-Leap-15.0-Non-Oss' is up to date.                                                                                                                                                               
   Repository 'openSUSE-Leap-15.0-Oss' is up to date.                                                                                                                                                                   
   Repository 'openSUSE-Leap-15.0-Update' is up to date.                                                                                                                                                                
   Repository 'openSUSE-Leap-15.0-Update-Non-Oss' is up to date.                                                                                                                                                        
   All repositories have been refreshed.
   Category5.TV SBC Benchmark v1.1
   Powered by sysbench 1.0.11
   Number of threads for this SBC: 4
   Performing CPU Benchmark… WARNING: the --test option is deprecated. You can pass a script name or path on the command line without any options.
   576.760 events per second. Price: Ģ930.02 per unit.
   Performing RAM Benchmark… WARNING: the --test option is deprecated. You can pass a script name or path on the command line without any options.
   3,625,781.466 events per second. Price: Ģ0.15 per unit.
   Performing Mutex Benchmark… WARNING: the --test option is deprecated. You can pass a script name or path on the command line without any options.
   6.873 events per second. Price: Ģ7.80 per unit.

Total Giggle cost of this board: Ģ1,397.58

Giggles (Ģ) are a cost comparison that takes cost and performance into account. While the figure itself is not a direct translation of a dollar value, it works the same way: A board with a lower Giggle value costs less for the performance.
 If a board has a high Giggle value, it means for its performance, it is expensive. Giggles help you determine if a board is better bang-for-the-buck, even if it has a different real-world dollar value. Total Giggle cost does not include I/O since that can be impacted by which SD card you choose. Lower Ģ is better.

Being that the suggested retail price is currently $149, we get a Gigglescore of 1,397.58. This is right between the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and the ODROID XU4 in terms of value for the dollar.

In my quest to further cement that openSUSE is the greatest Linux distribution ever, I have kicked the tires of yet another Linux Distribution, Sabayon. What Surprised me about this distribution was that it was Gentoo based yet installed very quickly, performed its updates quickly and was configured pretty decently out of the box. I … Continue reading Sabayon Linux | Review from an openSUSE User →