Friendship Restarted with openSUSE

(OR How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hyprland)

It’s April 2nd at the time I type this (with my actual publishing date being a few days afterward). As I mentioned before, the day has finally come! I survived on openSUSE for 30 days using it as a workstation system. So now that I’ve used the distro on my Lenovo ThinkPad for 30 days instead of my usual Fedora setup, what’s my final verdict?

I’m seriously thinking of removing Fedora and going all-in on openSUSE at this point.

For Real? But How?

It’s a fair question to ask. How could I do so well running openSUSE on my laptop, especially when running it on my desktop ended up as a stressful disaster? How did I get to this unlikely, strange point? I can’t even believe it myself, but I am honestly considering just using openSUSE full-time on my workstation.

As I discussed prior, I had a difficult time running openSUSE on my main desktop at home. My experience, especially when my triple-boot setup and Arch installation broke, was outrageously frustrating to deal with. Still, all of the things I said about a buggy KDE experience still stand. All of the things I said about Arch being (quite unexpectedly) much easier to work with still stand as well.

But the experience hasn’t been so bad on my ThinkPad. In fact, I would find everything rather comparable to my time using Fedora as a whole, especially my initial setup.

My Current Setup

When I started this challenge to use openSUSE for 30 days, I replicated my setup from my Fedora workstation. That included the GNOME desktop environment, the Forge tiling window extension, and a few other tweaks and apps installed that made it feel almost like a 1:1 comparison between Fedora and openSUSE.

But towards the end of my journey (read: this past week), I started to wonder if I could make things a bit more interesting. What if I could get a different window manager or desktop environment up and running? That would surely make it a different experience to use.

I know I had issues with Plasma 6, and I know I had a few issues with Hyprland. But that’s where I have some excellent news: I successfully got Hyprland working!

It wasn’t easy. I had to deal with building Waybar from Github, which took a lot of trial and error finding a missing dependency and trying again until it actually started building and eventually working. It turned out that the Waybar from the openSUSE repos was a total dead end and still gave me that same infuriating error while loading shared libraries: libjack.so.0 error. The trial and error part also largely dealt with how openSUSE dependencies tend to have different names than most other distros, so I would have to search for keywords within the dependency name and hope I stumbled into something with a close enough name through a zypper se query.

But once I got Waybar to work, the hardest part was over. All I needed to do was set everything up to my liking. Since I was (and still am) a total rookie when it comes to using Hyprland (I found AwesomeWM so cozy for the longest time), I decided to use config files from The Linux Cast.

I thought this would be a lot nicer than the config I used from the other YouTuber I stumbled into a few weeks ago, since his setup script shoehorned in a lot of his YouTube channel’s branding and other tools that I didn’t want. I mean, how would you like to have Alacritty forcibly installed when you’re already perfectly happy with Kitty?

Of course, the setup didn’t work right out of the box; I had to change things even on the config files from The Linux Cast, but his dot files are a great place to start from. Additionally, I don’t have the picture of it right now, but I also changed up the Arch setup to look similar but with the Nord palette colors instead. I didn’t really change colors on openSUSE, as I was already in a bit of a Gruvbox mindset at work, so I once again embraced the color scheme.

The whole setup isn’t also Matt’s either. I got a Wayland-friendly version of Rofi to work, and I tweaked my adi1090x setup from when I used AwesomeWM to integrate well with the theme and desktop. I added shortcuts to the rofi modules into the bindings file, and this is also where I really appreciate Matt’s foresight on compartmentalizing the different components of his Hyprland setup. Everything under the config file gets called up from various modules in a folder that Hyprland can easily call up, and this allows it so that I can easily “swap out” modular parts of Hyprland.

What Do You Think of Hyprland So Far?

Short Answer: I LOVE IT with some minor caveats.

Long Answer: I really like my time in Hyprland and finally feel like I’m able to truly embrace the beauty of having a Wayland compositor instead of something Xorg-based for once. However, I do have a few minor (and I mean minor) issues compared to when I ran the X11-based AwesomeWM for a few years.

1. There are far fewer bars to choose from compared to the options available for X11-based window managers, although that might change in due time.
   • I suppose I was a bit spoiled with how AwesomeWM always came with its own bar as well.
2. I don’t really like how workspaces are handled compared to AwesomeWM. There, I was able to have empty workspaces always visible, while my experience with Hyprland has been more comparable to that of i3 with workspaces only being visible on Waybar if something is present on them.
   • I think (?) I’ve seen some rices where people are able to get workspaces always visible regardless of whether or not an application is open or not, but I’m not sure if that’s what that is or not. Again, I’m still pretty new to Hyprland.
3. Fractional scaling on some apps is not so nice. With my main display on my laptop, I usually have to do some scaling to make things reasonably readable. Otherwise, I have to scale in a way that Hyprland likes only to see some apps look blurry on this display, or I’ll have to go with whole-number scaling and deal with things being too big or small.
   • I know about starting up apps with --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland, but it doesn’t seem like a very good solution to try and make all of my apps run this way, especially when some don’t recognize the command at all. Likewise, the env variables only do so much for me as well, although I’ve opened a different can of worms trying to get qt5 and qt6 to behave with a matching Gruvbox theme.

Still, despite those caveats, there’s much more to like than to dislike. For one, the effects are so breathtaking, especially coming from a rather utilitarian AwesomeWM configuration that I ran for years. Everything generally feels much smoother, and my issues seem like they could generally be fixed if I knew what I was doing a bit better. Regardless, I do have a few other issues I’ve encountered only on my openSUSE install compared to my Arch system, but speaking of that…

Are You Really Going to Delete Fedora?

Not just yet, although I have considered it. While I do love my current Hyprland setup on openSUSE, there are a few things here and there that aren’t quite working so well, as is the usual case when I use openSUSE. But in this instance with Waybar:

• I can’t get the network indicator to show up in Waybar at all. Meanwhile, with similar dot files, it shows up a-okay on my Arch system.
• Same deal with the systray. I know it’s supposed to be in the upper-left hand corner, but nothing shows up there at all. It shows up just fine on Arch.
• Volume indicator is MIA, although volume controls work perfectly fine. Again working on Arch but not on openSUSE.
• One more not necessarily related to Waybar, but Hyprcursor support. I get a generic cursor on openSUSE on most apps and just the plain desktop. While Hyprcursor doesn’t seem perfect on Arch, I do notice my settings carrying around more consistently in comparison.

I’m not 100% sure what to do about getting these to appear at all, but my results so far have been fruitless. I’ll update on these should I get them working. I know it has to be possible, especially considering that Matt from The Linux Cast seems to have a working systray and volume indicator in his video showcasing the Hyprland setup dot files.

BIG UPDATE: I finally got everything listed above and then some to work perfectly as of April 15th, 2024. My issue with the Waybar modules not working was because I was barely able to build a functioning version of Waybar in the first place. When trying to rebuild it, I realized it had to rebuild the modules that displayed my tray, audio devices, and network. Eventually, it failed for other buggy reasons, but my workaround was to install libjack0instead ofpipewire-libjack-0_3 as I had mistakenly believed. After that, the Waybar from the openSUSE repos successfully installed and ran just fine! Now all of my issues with Waybar on openSUSE are solved!

But that’s also a part of why I wanted to keep Fedora at least a bit longer for now. If I can get a Hyprland setup on that system up and running that looks even half as good as this setup with the working systray, volume, and/or network indicator, then I might find Fedora a tad more compelling again, especially since it still supports my home printer just fine.

ANOTHER BIG UPDATE: I had set up the same dot files on Fedora and found a lot of little things here and there rather buggy and glitchy. It was honestly a bit disappointing, so after some serious consideration and a couple of road bumps in the process, I erased Fedora and made openSUSE my daily driver on my workstation laptop.

Still, this doesn’t really make Fedora a bad distro at all. If I had to pluck a number, I would say Fedora has left me maybe 95% satisfied with the experience. The only real hiccups I’ve ever had with it are the longer boot times (likely due to all of the version upgrades over the past years) and package availability compared to that of Arch Linux.

Something else on this same subject is how I find everything strangely easy on Arch, even factoring in the time before we ever had archinstall. People used to complain that Arch was too bleeding edge, prone to breaking, or whatnot, but my experience with it has been the exact opposite of just that. While openSUSE TW is bleeding edge, I do find some things a little hacky at times (mostly with popular dependencies being renamed to weird variants for whatever reason), although I’m not 100% sure how much of that is just the distro itself or the fact that Arch seems to have better overall support in the Linux space.

The funniest part about this is how I was partially motivated by The Linux Cast to give openSUSE another try, and how this stint might be the one where I actually, finally stick with it. He made a remark in a video in the past few months (I wish I could remember which) where he remarked over how he was convincing more people to give openSUSE a shot, and how he saw himself as somewhat of an “influencer” in that way. Still, I would say the actual definition of being an influencer suits Matt well because he actually influences people with his ideas and actions rather than pandering as if he were a dubious car salesman in YouTube videos.

Have you considered using openSUSE Tumbleweed? Hyprland? Better yet, have you ever had one opinion or view on a distro only to renege on it at a later point? Feel free to comment, because I would love to know.