ENG | Moving from Fedora 44 to openSuse Slowroll

Motivation

I decided to switch to openSuse after using Fedora on notebook for 7 months and on server for 3 years. Motivation? I don’t know exactly. It was slow. I always considered both distros about equally good with openSuse having better installer and BTRFS snapshots - which allows rollback if some upgrade goes horribly wrong.

Three years ago, openSuse used apparmor and some weird network configuration, zypper used to be slow (different compression, no parallel downloads, slow mirrors, btrfs snapshots - likely combination of this). Now it uses SELinux and zypper feels about as fast as dnf.

Moreover, it introduced Tumbleweed Slowroll which solves my previous issue - Leap was quite outdated for software development, whereas Tumbleweed was torrent of updates. Slowroll promises to be monthly somewhat tested snapshots of Tumbleweed so if I understand it, it’s week to over a month behind, plus critical updates.

So I don’t see any drawbacks of openSuse, although I expect differences are minor. What I did not like about Fedora and maybe it was a last drop was upgrade of server after one year. Like upgrading PostgreSQL to new version without warning instead of allowing two versions in parallel. I wonder how openSuse solves this. On server I have (hopefully) no reason to touch anything for next year and keep Fedora 44. Three years, it was basically maintenance free. Last month I also had issues with Podman and it’s database, but this gave me warning at least and I had several months long window for migration.

Now I kind of understand why someone uses LTS Debian for years and then reinstalls/migrates the server to new hardware.

Installation

Installer is still yast-based for openSuse iso from early April, but experimental iso with agama installer is available.

Installation is quite easy. My disk partitions are basically unchanged, root and boot partitions were formatted and openSuse uses btrfs groups, so root filesystem has snapshots not including /var, /home and alike. Here it was needed to map volumes to mount points and formatting / and /boot.

Installation can copy users (and maybe system SSH keys) from old installation.

Installing openSuse over Fedora partitions

What broke?

I could not log in to graphical desktop. After three instant failures including IceWM, ugly terminal appeared over login screen (likely xterm). I noticed that it’s not my command prompt. So I typed sudo zypper in zsh which installed zshell. Having valid login shell in /etc/passwd fixed the problem. Nice - I fixed this almost instantly without Google.

Then I had to change icon in KDE applauncer settings :-).

SwayWM has openSUSEway config fighting with mine.

What changed?

Not much. On Fedora I had minor issues with KDE.

• Very slow start of KDE plasma 6.6 afer upgrade from 6.5. This is gone on openSuse.
• Konsole and JetBrains Mono font. Cursor is placed further right from text as line gets longer. This persists.
• Broken themes - some applications white, some dark, some broken mixing both styles. This was self-inflicted. It was caused by qt6ct used for theming because I wanted dark dialogs in sway. But qt6ct had selected Breeze/default theme, which in preview dialog inside KDE copied KDE style, but at the same time it somehow forced light style. Maybe setting both to Breeze/dark could have solved the problem.
  
  Initial motivation was theming KDE dialogs and apps in Sway WM.
  
  Solution:

  grep -r "qt6ct" ~/.config/environment.d/
  #/home/pavel/.config/environment.d/envvars.conf:QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt6ct
  

  This file contained a single line so I removed it.

So KDE is now nearly perfect, except Konsole bug with some fonts (also IBM Plex Mono, Hack) seems to exist for at least several months. Fira Code font is ok, but I prefer JetBrains. Well … some combinations of font and size are more ok. Most fun is placing block cursor over the last character.

Konsole with overlapping letters at cursor position, Fira Go font

First impressions (and rediscovering KDE)

Fastfetch with Commit Mono font

With release cycle of slowroll once in a month, I installed openSuse late evening before massive monthly update so next morning 90% of packages were reinstalled. Hopefully only breaking change is neovim and treesitter (which I’m not sure I even use) and there was some file conflict between libclang13-22.1.4-1.2 and llvm-libclang13-22.1.4-1.1.sr20260402 packages. In the afternoon there was treesitter and kernel upgrade from 7.0.2 to 7.0.3. In the mean time I uninstalled clang21. But this is something that does not shed a good light on Slowroll as first day experience.

Nonetheless Lazy update to update mini.statusline and nightfox.nvim theme worked.

Neovim, JetBrains Mono font

Also, on Fedora I had some issues with external monitor used as dock. I had weird moments when USB subsystem reset, keyboard or mouse stopped responding for few seconds and sometimes disconnected completely, which was annoying. So far it did not happen and I hope it won’t. But first day was fine.

When I played with KDE a bit, I was surprised that it has some features I wish on Windows. It can regulate brightness of external display. Not the one on notebook. When I shake mouse cursor, it gets bigger.

Unlike Sway, when I connect notebook to monitor, it redirects sound to HDMI so I don’t need to search for magic command (pactl set-card-profile alsa_card.pci-0000_00_1f.3 output:hdmi-stereo) in history.

I don’t use virtual desktops on KDE much, but I found out, that Alt+F3 always brings default window menu, so I can move it to a different desktop. One problem solved. Ctrl+Win+Arrow to switch desktops is not that fast, but for three desktop it’s ok I guess. Maybe I still prefer SwayWM on notebook with touchpad only. And four fingers swipe is quite fast too.

Btw, I was searching for some nice music player for Linux and found Tauon and Elisa as good options:

flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install --user flathub com.github.taiko2k.tauonmb                                     

Summary

First day survived. I worked mostly with VS Code remotely (writing last two articles), browsed web, listened to music. Flawlessly working docking is actually biggest upgrade for notebook, which was not expected, because it was always buggy with Linux kernels 6.x.xx.

Looking for software, I found Tauon music player and Commit Mono font which is somewhat similar to JetBrains Mono I use since 2020 or so.