OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Installation Notes

For future reference here are some issues I’ve come across installing and setting up Tumbleweed on my workstation.

The reason for switching from macOS is that a commercial operating system focused on services builts in too many distractions for me. Also long term the Apple hardware is priced above what I’m prepared to pay, so it makes sense for me to look for an alternative.

Tumbleweed is a rolling distribution which makes for a long term maintained setup, and packages are tested thoroughly but are quickly updated.

So far these are just little niggles.

Day one issues

• The old Grub menu from my previous Linux installation wasn’t wiped, I simply reinstalled making sure all existing partitions were deleted before partitioning.
• avahi is not allowed to start itself due to security policies. This was because dbus needed to restart after avahi installed configuration into it. I could have rebooted.
• My Apple Magic Keyboard must be selected in KDE after the installation as it’s not an option during the installation routine.
• Opening ports for OpenSSH means that they’re open on the public zone. I didn’t realise this as I want to use the home zone as default.Yast Firewall sorted this out.
• After installing Lutris, Steam and Proton Experimental, certain games would not start, due to missing vulkan drivers. This Lutris Wiki link describes the issue, I had to search Yast Software for vulkan showed I had to install libvulkan_intel and libvulkan_intel-32bit.

Interesting links

• There’s a nice tiling window manager script for KDE called Krohnkite. Meta-D conflicted with show desktop, after reassigning the latter I still think that shortcut doesn’t do anything, though.

So far so good. The interface is more snappy than macOS and more powerful, and the system is working nicely.