Hi Neal, On 07.01.21 15:43, Neal Gompa wrote:

2. yast2-network learns how to configure NetworkManager via its API or

That would be great. I was lately playing around with ARM boards that have only WiFi networking by default and the first problem was, that default JeOS only has wicked installed. Game over. The I installed the "X11" version of the image and that has NetworkManager. Actually with NetworkManager there is no need for YaST at all, just use either nmtui or nmcli to connect and be done. YaST also could just do system("nmcli dev wifi connect BSSID password SECRET") and be done.

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-> If I remember correctly, a TW DVD with online repos enabled installs only if no new snapshot was released. Enabling the online repos on a DVD install pulls most packages from the repository instead of the DVD. This is clearly not a smart move, and I would consider this as bug. The reviewer had actually the same complaint.

I agree with this complaint. It confused me as well when I first started using openSUSE, and it surprised me that there is no straightforward way to have both networking set up and use DVD repos for install.

Well, for tumbleweed the issue is slightly more complicated: Either you install with network enabled and get all updates during installation (which is what you told the installer you want ;-) or you install with network disabled and then, after enabling the network, get everything updated with "zypper dup" anyway. That's just the nature of a rolling distribution.

That is an important perspective to keep in mind as we want to make the distribution more approachable to the world.

Do we? ;-) Seriously: do we really want to make *Tumbleweed* the choice for new openSUSE users? By chasing away people asking questions on opensuse-factory and having them wait for weeks for their bug report to be even looked at in bugzilla in case of problems? Have fun, -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman

Stefan Seyfried wrote:

Hi Neal,

On 07.01.21 15:43, Neal Gompa wrote:

...

2. yast2-network learns how to configure NetworkManager via its API or

That would be great.

I was lately playing around with ARM boards that have only WiFi networking by default and the first problem was, that default JeOS only has wicked installed. Game over.

Hmm, I have only just today started wifi on my Nanopi Neo Air, no problems. I didn't configure the interface from scratch, but I do remember doing that with yast+wicked.

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That is an important perspective to keep in mind as we want to make the distribution more approachable to the world.

Do we? ;-) Seriously: do we really want to make *Tumbleweed* the choice for new openSUSE users? By chasing away people asking questions on opensuse-factory and having them wait for weeks for their bug report to be even looked at in bugzilla in case of problems?

Agree, I don't think we really want new users to start with Tumbleweed. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (-0.2°C) Member, openSUSE Heroes

On 07.01.21 18:39, Per Jessen wrote:

Hmm, I have only just today started wifi on my Nanopi Neo Air, no problems. I didn't configure the interface from scratch, but I do remember doing that with yast+wicked.

Compared to "nmcli connect dev wifi $SSID password $SECRET", using yast2 network module on the serial console is nothing I'd ever want to do again. So I just wrote "JeOS useless, use X11 image always" onto my cheat sheet and moved on ;-) But we're going off on a tangent now. -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman

On 07/01/2021 08:43, Neal Gompa wrote:

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 9:23 AM Axel Braun wrote:

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- setup of WIFI during installation 'is really old school' as one has to jump between different tabs to set it up. And, finally, the WIFI setting is not taken over to the installed system, so one has to enter it again (and he hit a known Plasma-bug by this https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=389052 ) -> can the WIFI setup be done on a single page? -> can the wifi settings be transferred to the installed system?

yast2-network needs to learn how to configure NetworkManager for this to be fixed.

There are two strategies for doing this:

1. NetworkManager gets configured with the ifcfg-rh plugin enabled and we patch the plugin to look at ifcfg files in /etc/sysconfig/network. This is an incomplete solution because RH and SUSE ifcfg file formats differ slightly and there has been no attempt to rationalize them into a uniform file format. This might be easier now that Red Hat is actively working to retire legacy ifcfg-style configuration for NetworkManager keyfiles, as the plugin could be forked upstream and an "ifcfg-suse" plugin could be fully adapted for SUSE-style files. This doesn't make YaST "better", but makes it kind of "work".

2. yast2-network learns how to configure NetworkManager via its API or by writing native NetworkManager keyfiles. This is actually the preferred way to do it, since the keyfiles format is the native format and supports all the features of NetworkManager, including telling NM to use encrypted stores for credentials. This is also the _required_ format for VPN configuration.

The podcaster(s) also noted that setting up YaST Network in the installer but choosing NetworkManager for after install, means (surprisingly to them) a duplicate network setup required after first boot.

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- there was some confusion around the activation of online repositories during installation from DVD. It is unclear where it is used or necessary for. -> a clarification that enabling the online repositories gives a wider variety of desktops and additional software should be included -> this hits for some parts the recent discussion if we can include repos like packman right at installation time -> If I remember correctly, a TW DVD with online repos enabled installs only if no new snapshot was released. Enabling the online repos on a DVD install pulls most packages from the repository instead of the DVD. This is clearly not a smart move, and I would consider this as bug. The reviewer had actually the same complaint. I agree with this complaint. It confused me as well when I first started using openSUSE, and it surprised me that there is no straightforward way to have both networking set up and use DVD repos for install.

Currently installer will always use latest available packages, from any enabled and available repo. Current options are no network, no online repos, install latest packages entirely from DVD; or yes network, enable online repos, and install latest packages (which are probably online). Is it really useful to install Tumbleweed with network available and intentionally keep the system out-of-date for the first boot? Eventually you will update, right -- and then the net bandwidth use is the same? In principle to achieve this the online repos could be added but kept disabled during installation, and enabled only after.

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Installation of software ========================

- After installation the reviewer obviously ran into severe performance problems (where it was not clear to me if this was coming from Intel Graphics or from free Nvidia driver). So he tried to install proprietary NVidia driver and had the issue that his graphics card was mentioned nowhere and he was unsure which driver to install ('this is managed on Fedora/Ubuntu with a checkbox, Arch installs one additional package'). In the istallation process, 'YaST hangs at 64% for ages' and he was uncertain whether to kill the process.

I suspect the issue was that NVIDIA driver installs appear to stall near the end due to regenerating mkinitrd in the post-install. YaST does not have a good way to guess progress of post-install scriptlets, obviously. Any ideas?

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-> can we improve the detection of hardware to recommend the right proprietary driver? I cant comment on how other distros do it, but it looks like this was easier. In Fedora, we have this set up with modalias() Provides and AppStream data with modaliases for the NVIDIA driver. This allows GNOME Software and Plasma Discover to suggest the correct driver for the hardware. Fedora Workstation has this workflow through GNOME Software for enabling and installing the driver.

The modalias() Supplements are present for openSUSE NVIDIA KMPs as well. In fact the counter-intuitive command `zypper install-new-recommends --no-recommends` will install this kind of suggested hardware packages, including NVIDIA if the repo has been added. AFAIK there is no equivalent of this in GUI, in either YaST or PackageKit/Discover/GNOME Software. Therefore I view this as a documentation / discoverability issue. In the sense that our NVIDIA install procedure *should* be the same as Fedora, but we have poor communication of this. (It doesn't help that web searching "openSUSE NVIDIA" comes up with a lot of outdated info and scary-looking forum posts.) Tejas

Am Samstag, 9. Januar 2021, 10:59:04 CET schrieb Neal Gompa:

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...

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- there was some confusion around the activation of online repositories during installation from DVD. It is unclear where it is used or necessary for. -> a clarification that enabling the online repositories gives a wider variety of desktops and additional software should be included -> this hits for some parts the recent discussion if we can include repos like packman right at installation time -> If I remember correctly, a TW DVD with online repos enabled installs only if no new snapshot was released. Enabling the online repos on a DVD install pulls most packages from the repository instead of the DVD. This is clearly not a smart move, and I would consider this as bug. The reviewer had actually the same complaint.

I agree with this complaint. It confused me as well when I first started using openSUSE, and it surprised me that there is no straightforward way to have both networking set up and use DVD repos for install.

Currently installer will always use latest available packages, from any enabled and available repo. Current options are no network, no online repos, install latest packages entirely from DVD; or yes network, enable online repos, and install latest packages (which are probably online).

Is it really useful to install Tumbleweed with network available and intentionally keep the system out-of-date for the first boot? Eventually you will update, right -- and then the net bandwidth use is the same?

In principle to achieve this the online repos could be added but kept disabled during installation, and enabled only after.

If you say 'no' to activate online repos at installation. the DVD installation adds the repos afterwards - otherwise TW would not roll :-)

When using the DVD, yes. Especially if you're on constrained bandwidth.

That was the main concern of the reviewer, he was on limited bandwidth. So if one wants to update later, 'no repo' is the way. But that limits you in the same moment on available desktops (for example)

Given the frequency of Tumbleweed updates, it's reasonable for this case to work, because forcing online repos to be used even when using the DVD media is essentially saying you don't want to let someone do a known-good install. There are legitimate reasons for needing to be able to do that (bypassing bugs in YaST, broken kernel in repos, etc.).

To clarify this in the future, I have created https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/ show_bug.cgi?id=1180707 for the YaST team Cheers Axel

Le dimanche 10 janvier 2021 à 12:31 -0600, Tejas Guruswamy a écrit :

On 09/01/2021 03:59, Neal Gompa wrote:

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Wicked has been broken for years for the desktop, which is why NetworkManager is the default for all cases except for servers. I would actually prefer to change it to NetworkManager for servers too, but that's blocked on fixing YaST.

What's your definition/bugs to call it broken? Not arguing, just trying to understand if there are limitations I'm not aware of.

FWIW I have it working fine on some machines, the big issue I have with it is poor hotplug behaviour. So it stays on desktops while laptops get NM (I think this is also the installer logic).

Wicked doesn't integrate at all with the various desktop UI to handle Wifi, because its d-bus interface is not the same as NetworkManager Same for handling VPN (which is nicely integrated in NM). If you are just using ethernet, you might not notice a difference, indeed. -- Frederic Crozat Release Manager SUSE Linux Enterprise SUSE

Hi Neal, I'm a bit worried we've got this discussion on project@, but things aren't actually moving much as far as the distro goes. On Thu 2021-01-07, Neal Gompa wrote:

Yes. YaST looks pretty terrible on HiDPI screens (2K and higher).

I'll see that I can push this a bit; just reached out to colleage on the project management front to hopefully sponsor a bit of effort. We really need to improve here.

...

- setup of WIFI during installation 'is really old school' as one has to jump between different tabs to set it up. And, finally, the WIFI setting is not taken over to the installed system, so one has to enter it again (and he hit a known Plasma-bug by this https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=389052 )

That one's moving at last; not super speedily, but moving.

yast2-network needs to learn how to configure NetworkManager for this to be fixed.

There are two strategies for doing this:

As not to forget this, can you file this as a Jira ticket or bug? (You got Jiri access as a test user, IIRC? Now might be a good time to file this.)

...

-> can we improve the detection of hardware to recommend the right proprietary driver? I cant comment on how other distros do it, but it looks like this was easier. In Fedora, we have this set up with modalias() Provides and AppStream data with modaliases for the NVIDIA driver. This allows GNOME Software and Plasma Discover to suggest the correct driver for the hardware. Fedora Workstation has this workflow through GNOME Software for enabling and installing the driver.

Isn't openSUSE doing something similar? At least for a sound driver my new system needed I was told it should work that way (now - after my bug report which got the ID added for the existing driver). ;-) Gerald

On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 9:14 AM Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

Hi Neal,

I'm a bit worried we've got this discussion on project@, but things aren't actually moving much as far as the distro goes.

On Thu 2021-01-07, Neal Gompa wrote:

...

Yes. YaST looks pretty terrible on HiDPI screens (2K and higher).

I'll see that I can push this a bit; just reached out to colleage on the project management front to hopefully sponsor a bit of effort. We really need to improve here.

That's awesome. I think this is more of a function of HiDPI screens not being common for Linux developers. Once people have them, it's a lot easier to account for.

...

...

- setup of WIFI during installation 'is really old school' as one has to jump between different tabs to set it up. And, finally, the WIFI setting is not taken over to the installed system, so one has to enter it again (and he hit a known Plasma-bug by this https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=389052 )

That one's moving at last; not super speedily, but moving.

...

yast2-network needs to learn how to configure NetworkManager for this to be fixed.

There are two strategies for doing this:

As not to forget this, can you file this as a Jira ticket or bug? (You got Jiri access as a test user, IIRC? Now might be a good time to file this.)

You're right, I forgot about that. I'll file an issue in the SUSE JIRA right away.

...

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-> can we improve the detection of hardware to recommend the right proprietary driver? I cant comment on how other distros do it, but it looks like this was easier. In Fedora, we have this set up with modalias() Provides and AppStream data with modaliases for the NVIDIA driver. This allows GNOME Software and Plasma Discover to suggest the correct driver for the hardware. Fedora Workstation has this workflow through GNOME Software for enabling and installing the driver.

Isn't openSUSE doing something similar? At least for a sound driver my new system needed I was told it should work that way (now - after my bug report which got the ID added for the existing driver). ;-)

I am unsure. I don't have any examples where I see this happening myself, so I don't know for sure if it does or does not exist. It seems reasonable to expect it to exist in openSUSE as well. I'm pretty sure the concept originated from SUSE Linux back in the day anyway... -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 6:06 PM Adrien Glauser wrote:

There is another (albeit minor) point to take away: neither speaker seemed to be aware of the main value-proposition of Tumbleweed (one speaker suggested it was Yast), even though they clearly had prepared notes and done some research ahead of the podcast.

This means we should be absolutely crystal clear on what that value-proposition is, which in some people's book, including mine, is the combo snapper + btrfs + tumbleweed-cli + openQA, which means a cheap ticket for superb stability in a bleeding edge environment, which both Linux pros and freshmen should adore.

If *that* is the value-proposition of TW on the desktop, then podcasters and other influencers should not even have to *search* for the info -- it should be impossible to miss. So that even this honourable gentleman (https://youtu.be/TgpBcwpj5b8?t=1011) couldn't miss it anymore.

TBH I just watched the entire video before, and would like to make a counter-argument to his statement, look at what microsoft is doing, quarterly feature updates, but much longer major version life-span...