Only after a couple weeks of usage did I notice how peaceful everything was. No notifications, no alerts, no sound of any form!

As desirable as some peace and quiet might be, I do need to hear things from my computer every now and again. I scurried off to diagnose the problem.

I use a simple terminal-based UI for managing sound on my machines pulsemixer, which was not showing any sound cards attached to the machine. Searching for similar issues with this hardware, a search engine brought me to a Fedora-related thread where a particular package was referenced as having solved the problem: sof-firmware.

For well over a decade I have used openSUSE, the reasons are not relevant for this post, but Fedora-alikes and openSUSE are usually close enough in packages, naming, and ethos, that forum threads and discussions for one can apply to the other:

zypper in sof-firmware

Suddenly Slack was knocking down my door again, and I had sound! Ta-da! Of course I closed Slack, muted the sound, and went back to work.

Generally speaking Linux hardware support has gotten so good in the last decade that I forget the olden days when we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get a working set of desktop drivers.

Maybe next year will finally be the year..

Today’s example was a common situation, one in which I frequently find myself: I want to use a tool which is available in the distribution’s packages but doesn’t quite have all features enabled. In today’s prototype, I was tinkering around with rsyslog and Apache Kafka via the omkafka module.

One problem: the default rsyslog package did not come with omkafka enabled, and omkafka was not packaged through another means. Since my test instance was running openSUSE, I found the rsyslog package, branched it, and made some minor changes to build a rsyslog-module-kafka rpm.

But wait! That’s not even the cool part!

Using the power of OBS, the project I branched (imagine the GitHub fork model) started building my changes immediately, and published my development packages within minutes! Suddenly I was able to have a fully formed rpm repository with my package in it. One which I could enable in my test environment and immediately start using!

Rather than fooling around with an entire custom build of rsyslog, I spent around an hour in between a couple of meetings tweaking the official package to add Kafka support, and then was back to the real work of prototyping!

OBS was well worth the learning curve!

With recent versions of Firefox Quantum, basically Firefox released over the past couple years, Chrome/Chromium, and Opera (apparenlty) a Yubikey can be used directly within web browsers as an external security key. In my case, every time I tried to configure the device on sites loaded in either Chromium or Firefox, I simply couldn’t make it work. The Yubikey would instead spit out a random string of garbage. This is one valid mode of the Yubikey, where it acts like a pretend keyboard and generates One-Time Passwords (OTP). In my case, I wanted it to act like a Universal 2-Factor authentication device (U2F).

First try was using the Yubikey manager to poke at the device. This application can be installed with zypper in yubikey-manager-qt. The installed binary is frustratingly not called yubikey-manager but instead is named ykman-gui. With that hurdle overcome, I tried to inspect the “FIDO2” application on the Yubikey but that consistently fail.

Utilizing a mixture of “opensuse” “yubikey” and “u2f” I stumbled into an openSUSE Buildservice link for a promising package named u2f-host. As luck would have it, the u2f-host package ended up being the missing link between Firefox and my Yubikey. After executing zypper in u2f-host and restarting Firefox, I was able to successfully register and use my Yubikey across a myriad of websites!

A tiny (nano, actually) Christmas miracle! :)

I was originally attrached to openSUSE due to their truly innovative work in packaging Linux. They championed reiserfs, xfs, and later btrfs. From my understanding, they shipped the first production “delta RPMs” to users. Most of all openSUSE packaged numerous desktop environments well and emphasized user choice and flexibility, at a time when Ubuntu was chasing the One True User Experience, attempting to emulate the Mac OS X playbook.

When I left for Debian, openSUSE was at a bit of a cross-roads. The openSUSE Tumbleweed project had just started to get focus, but overall the entire distribution felt trapped between two extremes: old packages and high quality, or new packages and low quality. Over time, I also became rather frustrated that newer tools were never packaged for openSUSE, but almost always provided for Red Hat and Debian users.

I started to feel the itch again after successive upgrades of Debian on my primary laptop. That old problem of new packages with low quality or old packages with high quality was creeping into my day-to-day more and more. Reflecting upon much of the software I was using, I realized that much of it wasn’t actually packaged for Debian, but relied on the comedy trio of curl, pipe, and bash.

The catalyst for my return was an infrastructure issue in the Jenkins project, wherein I needed to re-familiarize myself with the openSUSE Build Service. An installation of Open Build Service (OBS), yet another openSUSE innovation, OBS allows for users and developers to easily create packages for a myriad of operating systems. I have long had an account in OBS, but had not really taken advantage of it. Looking at a smattering of unpackaged garbage strewn across the file system, and then considering this excellent tool for packaging applications for Linux, I had found a solution to (some) of my woes. One afternoon of playing around with packaging sway (packages here), I was sold: back to openSUSE.

OBS is what drew me back in, but I have noticed that openSUSE Tumbleweed is far more stable and mature than it once was, providing much newer packages with good quality. I am not sure what other tunables openSUSE ships with, but I have noticed a dramatic reduction in resident memory usage, running similar workloads to what I had previously under Debian. Finally, everything I was using previously is packaged now, which makes me feel much better about the state of the system. Signal, Sway, Docker, and everything else already provided by most systems is coming through easily managed and upgraded packages. The only things I’ve curl-bashed have been RVM and Rust, but I have no expectations that RVM or Rust nightly would fit into any sane packaging scheme.

I recommend trying out openSUSE, for me it strikes the balance between stability of a curated system and providing power users flexibility, with minimal sacrifices in either direction.

What can I say, a tidy system brings me joy.