Welcome to Linux Saloon a place to discuss tech, open source and where Linux is always on Tap.
Tonight we covered topics in the news thanks to the help from Michael on “This Week in Linux” who supplied the stories.
00:23:56 – KDE Plasma 5.25.0
00:32:52 – Wayland Experiences
00:45:32 – Odroid With Wayland
00:50:21 – Device Convergence
00:54:48 – Wearable Tech and Augmented Reality
00:57:31 – KDE Connect and Convergence
00:58:42 – SpiralLinux Project
01:03:47 – Next Week’s Menu: Distro Exploration of Fedora 36
01:04:50 – Closing Time
01:10:00 – Bloopers
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Hey there @CubicleNate , thanks a lot for the mention of SpiralLinux! I would be interested in knowing how it works on one of Dan Kelly’s famous “potatoes”, especially the ones with Broadcom WiFI, I think it has a decent chance of supporting it out-of-the-box.
I would like to share your optimism about the future of ALP eventually satisfying openSUSE Leap users’ needs and preferences. But everything seems to be pointing to a radical change to SLE within a few years, motivated by SUSE’s corporate and profit interests. I’ll reserve my opinion on that last part. But at least at this juncture it doesn’t look too promising for use as a flexible general desktop operating system:
https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/vb4268/is_opensuse_leap_really_on_its_deathbed/ic8cyst/?context=3
So there’s that. Regarding the question “Why not Fedora?” for the SpiralLinux base, good question. @MichaelTunnell had the same question on This Week in Linux 202, here’s my response:
I do not want to make a big fuss about it but I read one of your concerned posts here in another thread and it seems to be you are right.
Now I cannot find it anymore and usually I do not trust, read and follow some random Reddit threads, but Richard Brown himself said in one of them that Leap is indeed going away. It is buried in all those posts in r/openSUSE.
As for why not Fedora in the case of SpiralLinux, I totally get it. One branch of Gecko is using Leap and therefore Debian stable makes sense. Fedora with its release cycle is not appropriate for such a case and now my opinion, it never was.
I get that Fedora is cool but the support for one release is too short. I am also biased as a Debian user.
So I applaud your efforts for such an interesting take on Debian and only using Debian’s default repositories. A lot of Debian spins are “FrankenDebians” like e.g MX Linux* that you cannot upgrade to the next version, at least not officially, because of all the added third party software. In your case that should be possible. Personally I do not use Flatpaks and snapshots, but this makes SpiralLinux a very modern Debian derivative.
*There is nothing wrong with MX Linux per se. The project does not hide its upgrade policy. You could take any other Debian based distribution for this example.
I think this is an interesting idea, the “death of Leap” but I really think that this is a bit of an alarmist response to the changes being made. Perhaps it is just my “normalsy” bias but since Leap is a community run project and openSUSE has historically kept the community’s desires at its core, the final result of the changes they make, incorporating the immutable characteristics for the root system will likely be done in such a way that won’t “Kill” Leap but rather move it to the next level. Tech continues to change, grow and morph to the changing requirements and demands on our technology. That said, I still fully support the idea of developing SpiralLinux. I think there needs to be something on the Debian side of things that push in a lot of these more modern technologies and methods into that part of the Linux world.
Hey Nate, thanks for the reply.
Well, Richard Brown rather undiplomatically described openSUSE Leap as being in a “parasitic” relationship with SUSE. And openSUSE Leap is actually a downstream product of SLE, whereas Tumbleweed is the upstream that contributes to the next SLE release. So as offensive as his comments have been, it appears accurate that openSUSE Leap (not Tumbleweed) is only a community project in the sense that it has a community of users that benefit from SUSE’s code dumps. SUSE has confirmed that it will no longer be sharing its packages with the openSUSE project after SLE 15 SP5, so that would spell the end of the line for openSUSE Leap after version 15.5. Unfortunately it’s not just conjecture at this point, it’s straight from the horse’s mouth. They even said that to reduce pushback from the community they’ll probably still have “Leap” in the name of the new product based on ALP. But it will bear no resemblance to the traditional slow-moving OS that we currently know as Leap.
Of course, this is all moot for users that actually want a new-age buzzword-compliant Linux OS with an immutable filesystem, nuclear updates, and container-based everything, as that is what SUSE is going to turn their enterprise product into, and they will be sharing it with openSUSE.
I can’t say I am on top of everything in the openSUSE project but with my involvement with the project, I have seen more of a merger between Leap and SLE to the point where the variation is just some branding and community packages. I guess time will tell. Everything in the world is constantly in flux.
I can’t say I agree with any one member of any project 100% (except maybe @MichaelTunnell, he’s pretty cool
) but I have to say I do agree with moving everything to the rolling model as opposed to a static release. In my mind, some aspect of that would reduce the technical liabilities of all these projects that is required to keep older releases properly patched.
Now, this is the opinion of someone that does nothing when it comes to the technical underpinnings, only reading the opinions of various people that do.
I am kind of an optimist. openSUSE has done me well with all their changes over the last 12 years I have been using it so I appreciate how they keep the train rolling.
Continue the discussion at forum.tuxdigital.com
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