Customize your Tumbleweed!

Patterns, packages, and YaST, oh my! Here's how I set up a custom OpenSUSE Tumbleweed installation for creating videos.
Download here:
get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed

[@mrderby01]

Thank you for making not only interesting but informative videos that help others to learn about Linux overall. 🖥🥰

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Glad you think so!

[@agstar5837]

Simply yet another masterful and educational video from you, one of many!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thank you! Cheers!

[@r3dlobst3r36]

I have gone back to the archinstall video so many times to help me with btrfs support. Thank you for the videos!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

You are so welcome!

[@timfd.w.4163]

Excellent video. I've learned to solve the printer NET install mistery... And that explanation about zram and snapshots was indeed nice.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Great to hear!

[@islam-karam]

Once again, you've returned with an awesome video-welcome back!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Hey, thanks!

[@reimueller]

Thx. for another great helping video. I’m using Suse TW since 1 year and it works perfect my first choice after Arch. I never needed to rollback but now I know how easy it is.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Good stuff!

[@The-Other-Mario]

Hey Stephen, just wanted to say how much I enjoy your channel! I noticed you haven't been uploading as frequently lately, I hope everything's okay and you're doing well. Take care!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

All is good, some life changes underway - we'll see! Cheers!

[@fabriziot1467]

After watching this video you no longer need to thumb docs 😁, I am joking of course. Opensuse seems to me a quite underrated distro and I totally agree with you about installer, in my opinion is one of the the best if not the best one, you can manage partition, volumes, package and whatever you want. I wanted to thank you for the language you use in your videos, maybe you didn't think about it but for me as a foreigner it is very understandable.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Glad to hear it! :)

[@MC-hammered]

I miss your videos Stephen. I hope you are well.

[@davidwayne9982]

Just getting ready to try Open Suse-- one other guy on here says it's even MORE stable than Debian..and looks cool, Wanted to know about flatpaks which you have in here-- THANK YOU MUCH!!!

[@nieleletronica]

My favorite hair guy is back! ;)

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Like your worst nightmare! ;)

[@josephlo4531]

Thanks for the video - would like to see plasma 6 on tumbleweed

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Great suggestion!

[@und3rpr]

That is an amazing tutorial. I learned a lot, thank you. You could possibly check the possibility of doing one on configuring gnome?

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Great suggestion!

[@VicharB]

5900HX with 8GB ... c'mon man! Just joking. :)) Not comparing directly, but I had EliteBook 5850U/16GB/1TB Sammy 970 Evo Plus running Tumbleweed nicely, and recently upgraded to EliteBook 7840U/32GB/5G with 2TB Sammy 990 Pro SSD, everything runs out of box - 5G/ambient light,- fingerprint, etc. Tumbleweed has been my primary OS for over 6 years, and SuSE since 7.x. I run Breeze Dark with Materia Manjaro Dark colours theme, with ascent #577dac, for past 2 years+ and really like it, the rest is as is. 1920x1200 with 100% scale, but in some apps like Firefox I use 110% scale. Hardening index : 89 [################# ] Nice video, thanks.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

That's 8 GB for the VM, the host has much more! ;) Thanks for sharing and commenting!

[@janmussche6815]

Thank you for this video. I am constantly switching between Tumbleweed and Fedora KDE. With a VM I can now have one as host and the other as guest. I do have a question about swap memory. I set it up the way you did it in this video and almost immediately swap was used already. When memory consumption gets less after the moment the system needed swap, when will swap use be 0 again? It seems to me, swap always has some content even though memory use is very little. How does this work? Thanks.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Glad it was helpful! Hard to tell what's going on over the internet :) Your system may require some tuning, but it seems like normal kernel behavior to me: wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram It will usually reset to 0 swap usage on reboot. For more swap discussion, some people think this helps: www.linuxatemyram.com/

[@Jacek..]

For flatplak you need to have very capacious disks or a small amount of software on your computer.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Large disks can help! :)

[@davidwayne9982]

CAN this be DUAL BOOTED with another distro on same drive? IF so- do BOTH have bo be BTRFS?

[@eobardthawnemcoc]

Should i enable zram swap (as u did in the video) if my laptop is older and have only 16 gigs?

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

I would - it's there to improve performance, especially if you already have 16G!

[@RonVichar]

My Tumbleweed system installed with swap. I hope that zram will help out with the performance issues I am experiencing with the aggresive snapper defaults that hang my system. by hang I mean my system is frozen for several minutes until snapper cleanup completes its task. the default scheduler has this going off every hour!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Spinning drive or SSD? I would turn off hourly snapshots and only make pre/post for zypper upgrades or transactions. Sounds like a horrible experience! Good luck!

[@RonVichar]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 I use SSD/NVME drives. My system crashed and my ability to access snapshots via grub disappeared. Fortunately, the TW installer has an upgrade option which allowed me to refresh my system back into a working state. I turned off legacy swap and edited my sysctl tunings for SSD drives including page-cluster, swappiness and page_pressure and edited the snapper config as suggested to turn off the hourly and a couple other options OpenSuse recommends in their documentation to reduce I/O hang. Knock on Wood everything is working :)

[@johnwestervelt1525]

I see you installed with Secure Boot enabled. I have not been able to get OpenSUSE to boot with Secure Boot since March 2023. Did you by any chance encounter any issues with OpenSUSE's Secure Boot? I have learned and made cheat sheets from most all of your videos. Really appreciated. Thanks much!

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Hi, I've not run into the SB issue you described myself yet - very strange! Maybe you can factory restore your SB keys on your device and try again, but back up your data first and exercise caution, e.g: www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/qx8k1y/help_cleared_secure_boot_keys_in_order_to_enable/

[@damnhatesyou]

I wish i could use tumbleweed on my desktop but doing the nvidia drivers in tumbleweed sucks

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Linux and nvidia is still harder than it needs to be imho. :/

[@einsteinorwell]

I tried to install Debian 12.5 i386 on an old HP laptop today. I got to 50 seconds of the installation left and the laptop died. Something went badly wrong and now I can't use the laptop. I can't find any helpful information anywhere. The laptop has been fine with other operating systems installed. Windows 7, Linux Mint and openSUSE Tumbleweed. The only reason I never kept Tumbleweed is because the software centre wouldn't work. It would start loading and then just close. Experiences like these are some of the things that discourage people from using Linux.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for sharing. The i386 compatibility seems to be dwindling more and more - not enough people around to maintain anymore?

[@eobardthawnemcoc]

Why aren't u seeing comments... Anyways make more videos on opensuse tumbleweed pls there's so much more to it and you're experienced but still u don't share much

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

Thanks for the feedback!

[@greenhorngameplays5743]

hey man, I know that we're not closer to each other but, is everything alright? it's been 4 months from your last video. I hope that everything is fine with you. The world needs great guys like you, @RoboNuggie and @GaryHTech.

[@stephenstechtalks5377]

All is well here, thanks for asking! Doing some pretty big projects that are taking up all my time lately...

[@greenhorngameplays5743]

@@stephenstechtalks5377 totally understandable. just remember that we'll be here when you come back man. Take care and we hope that you can come back soon.