 OpenSUSA has become my favorite distro of all time. Over the course of the last six months, I've made many, many videos about OpenSUSA talking about why I've chosen it, why I really like it so much, and why you should give it a try as well. Now today, what I want to do is, if you have decided to give OpenSUSA a try, there are several things that you should do after you install it that will make your experience better and actually make OpenSUSA usable, because there are quite a few things that you have to do post-install to get things up and running, just like there is with any distro. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to talk about the 10 things to do after you install OpenSUSA. But before we jump in, if you'd leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it. It would really help the channel. So first, we need to talk about a couple of disclaimers. The first one is that this video specifically is pertaining to OpenSUSA tumbleweed. If you are using OpenSUSA LEAP, the vast majority of the stuff that I'm going to be talking about today should also apply to you. If you're using Micro or whatever they're calling it these days, Aeon or however you pronounce it, or any of the other distributions given out by OpenSUSA, these things may or may not be necessary for you. So just kind of keep that in mind that this specifically applies towards tumbleweed and mostly LEAP. So just kind of again, keep that in mind. The second thing that I want to talk about is that when you see me showing off my screen today, just know that yours isn't going to look like mine because I'm in a window manager and I've done theming. So the process is going to be the same, the paint's going to be different. So just keep that in mind as we go through. So the first thing you'll want to do after installing usually involves updating your system. Now you're going to update your system during the course of this video. We're going to talk about that actually towards the end, but we don't want to get there yet until we've actually made OpenSUSA usable to update because out of the box zippers actually fairly slow. So what we're going to do first is actually make Zipper faster. So for those of you who don't know if you're brand new to OpenSUSA, Zipper is the terminal package manager for OpenSUSA. It's Z-Y-P-P-E-R. We're going to talk more about it later in depth, but just bear with me as we go through trying to make it a little bit faster. So there are several ways you can make Zipper faster. And I'm going to show you a couple of them. You can hop onto Google and search on how to make Zipper faster. And you're going to find dozens of responses to the question how to make Zipper faster. Some of them work, some of them don't work. The ones I'm going to show you today work sometimes. And I'm still going to tell you that Zipper is going to be slow no matter what you do. Don't expect miracles here. You can change to different mirrors if you want to change to different mirrors. If you don't want to rely on OpenSUSA's automatic mirror selection, you can do all that kind of stuff and still be basically in the same position you started out in. But we're going to make some changes to the zipper.com file, which is located at etsyzip.zip.com. So we're going to go into this particular file right here. You can use whatever text editor you have installed. Vim is not installed and Vim is not installed. So you're probably going to end up using nano, but I'm going to use NVim because of reasons. So you're going to get into this. You're going to enter your password that you set up during install. And you're going to see a file that looks like this. So there are two actual lines that you're going to want to change or in this case add to this file. The first one is download.max underscore concurrent underscore connections equals 10. Neither of the, I believe this one here is there by default, but I think it's set to one. So set it to 10 or five, whatever you want to do. And then the second one you want to do is download.min underscore downloads underscore speed. That's going to make sure that it kind of prunes out any mirrors that underneath that speed. Now, here's a couple of things. First, zipper does not support parallel downloads. So this max concurrent connections does not actually give you concurrent downloads like you would get in Pac-Man on Arch or on app or DNF or whatever. You can't do that on zipper. It just doesn't support it. What the concurrent connections will do will basically it allows it to connect to several mirrors at a time and choose the fastest one quicker instead of just doing it one at a time. At least the way that I understand it. The second one, as I said, basically just prevents zipper from connecting to any mirrors that are slower than that particular speed. That second number there, you can play around with it if you're still experiencing slow connections to mirrors. So you can change that number however you want. It doesn't really matter. I just have it set to 20,000 because that's what I found online. So once you're done with this, you'll want to save this file and then later on you'll see the benefits of your work. Okay, so the next one that you'll want to do is learn YAST. Now, this is an optional one, but I'm putting it at the top because it's important for the vast majority of people. So if you're planning on not using OpenSUSA as a terminal-based distro like I usually do and you want to do most of your work in the GUI, YAST is going to be your friend because it's going to control all of your software management, your repository management. Basically anything you want to do on your computer can be done in YAST. I have a whole video that I've posted on my channel talking about all the things that YAST can do. I highly recommend checking that out. I'll try to link it in the video description below or put it in a flag up here above on the top. But you check that out, you can see all the things that YAST can do. I highly recommend going and checking that video out. But what you want to do is open up YAST. So you're going to open up your app menu. This is what mine happens to look like. And you're going to find YAST. Now, again, remember that mine's not going to look the same as yours because I'm in a window manager. I don't have the luxury of seeing a fancy Paul kit, which is basically the little window that comes up to ask for your pseudo password. Mine's going to be coming up in basically what looks like X term. You're going to, no matter what this looks like, it's going to ask for your root password. So you enter that and then you do this. Now I'm going to make that really small so you don't have to see it. So this is what YAST looks like. Again, the pants going to be a little bit different, but the layout is going to be the same. So I'm not going to cover everything that YAST does. I'll point you towards the other video, but there's a couple of things here that you'll want to just kind of know about, even if you're not going to delve deep into YAST. One, and probably the most important one is software management. You open this up and it looks, let me see, make sure if I can get this bigger. It looks like this. Basically, if you wanted to say, install Adacity, it would look like that and you can install Adacity. This is the software manager by default for OpenSUSA. Now, if you've installed like the Plasma version of OpenSUSA, you'll also get discover so you could use that. But the default version that kind of transcends no matter what desktop environment you're using is YAST. So you'll want to make sure you're familiar with YAST in case you don't have access to things like discover or GNOME software store. So this is where you'll install all of your software. So highly recommend you learning how to use YAST. But again, I'll point you towards the video where I talk more in depth about YAST. The next one that you should do is, and this is not, again, mandatory but I highly recommend that you do it and it doesn't really need to be done now but I just put it here because in case you're having problems, the best place to find help is on the OpenSUSA forums which is available at forums.opensusa.org. And in order to actually use the forums and actually participate in the forums, you'll need an account. So somewhere during this process you should make a form account that way you can go in and ask questions if you need to. Alternatively, if you don't want to use the forums, you can also check out the Discord server which looks like this and you can go to their support channel here in the Discord server and actually get help there as well. This seems to be more active than the forums sometimes. It really does kind of depend on the time of day but in both places you can get help if you need to but both do require account. So if you are going, if you're having problems or you expect you might have problems, both of these places are places that you can go to get help. Okay, so the next one is probably the most important one on the list. And that's because there are some things that OpenSUSA doesn't have out of the box that you really do kind of need. The biggest one is Codex. Now this is kind of like Fedora for you. They don't install any of the proprietary pieces of software that you need to play certain videos or display certain icons in Discord, for example. If you want to display emojis, in some cases you need the Codex package to actually display those. It's really weird but most of this is going to be focused on actually being able to play videos and music on your system. So in order to do this, the best way to do it is going to be from the terminal. Well, you can do this again through yes. Everything I'm talking about today can be done through yes if you want to. I'm gonna show you the terminal way of doing it just because that's the way I'm the most familiar with. So, and because I consider it quite easy because as you saw with yes, you have to have a lot of windows open. You know, it can be very confusing if you don't know what you're doing right out of the box. So just a couple of lines here. The first thing you want to do is do sudo, zipper, install, and then OPI. Now, OPI is your friend. It's the best thing on OpenSUSA outside of ButterFS snapshots. OPI, you can think of OPI if you're familiar with Arch Linux as the yay of OpenSUSA. Basically, this allows you access to the community repositories of OpenSUSA. So you want to install this and you just enter, it's gonna ask you for your password. I've already done this so I can just do this and it's gonna tell me that I already have it installed. But basically, once you've had it installed, you want to do OPI and then codecs, okay? And what this is going to do is it's going to install the Pac-Man repository. Now, the Pac-Man repository is the biggest community repository that OpenSUSA has to offer. It's not officially supported, but everyone uses it, okay? It's kind of like the AUR only. OpenSUSA doesn't really have an AUR. It has more like a whole bunch of AURs that are kind of included with OPI, right? It's very confusing, but you'll get the idea as you use it more often. So basically what this is going to do is it's going to install the codecs from the Pac-Man repository. So you'll hit yes and then it's gonna go through and install codecs. It may ask you for confirmation a couple of times. Now, mine's gonna look a little weird because I already have all that stuff installed and I have different versions installed. So it's gonna ask me if I want to skip or delete other things or whatever. I'm not gonna do any of this stuff because I don't wanna break anything because I already have all the stuff installed but you should be able to fly right through this just by answering yes a couple of times and it's gonna install through zipper all the codecs that you need in order to view video, emojis, all sorts of stuff on your system. So that's the next one that you'll wanna do. It'll also enable the Pac-Man repository so you shouldn't have to do that again later on. If it doesn't, you can add that from the ask or from the command line if you want but it should do it automatically. Okay, so the next one on the list isn't going to apply to everyone, only those of you who have NVIDIA drivers. Now I do not have NVIDIA drivers so I'm not even going to attempt to do any of this stuff because I don't need to install any of it but I'm going to link to this particular article in the description below and basically what this will do is it will outline how you install NVIDIA drivers. Now you can do this in a couple different ways. It points you towards an application called ZYPP. You can use that. You can also use just flat out YAST. I believe you can install the NVIDIA drivers directly through YAST. I'm not actually sure. The other way of doing it and probably the way that I'd suggest doing it is just using zipper. So you can enable the zipper repositories for NVIDIA. So make sure you pay attention to the header here. So this one here is for LEAP. This one here is for Tumbleweed. They're actually the same command so you really don't have to worry about it too badly but you'll want to make sure that you follow the one that's for your particular version of OpenSUSA and then you just follow these instructions. You can either do it through YAST or you can do it through the command line, whatever way you want to do it. You just have to enable the repository then install them. So that's what you have to do. Again, only for people who have NVIDIA drivers. If you have an AMD driver, OpenSUSA supports you right out of the box. You don't have to worry about it at all. Okay, so the next one is more learning and this one's going to take you a little time because you're going to have to kind of use it to learn it and it's not that hard. I think the zipper has the best syntax out of all the package managers out there. Maybe outside of apt and DNF, I suppose. Those are really pretty simple but OpenSUSA is pretty good. It's definitely better than Arches which is just weird. So there are a few just to get you started that you should know. So sudo zipper in is the equivalent of sudo zipper install. So you can do things like sudo zipper in and then audacity if you want to, whatever, right? That would be the same thing as saying sudo zipper install audacity. The next thing you'll want to learn is how to search zipper. Now again, if you're planning on using just YAST, you don't have to go through and do this. I should mention that because if you're never going to use zipper you don't need to know zipper but if you're planning on doing anything in the terminal with zipper you should learn some of these things. And what you want to do is search and then you can search audacity. Again, we're just using audacity because I have it in front of my face and that's the one that is in the forefront of my mind. You can do that or similar with install you can do just SE and audacity. And then you hit that and it will ask you for your password. I don't know if you can do that without sudo. I've never actually tried. And then it's going to show you a listing of the packages that meets your search criteria. So then you can know what the package name is going to be. You can then copy it and then install it. Or if you're looking for a particular version or if you have multiple options for where to install from you can find all that stuff out here with search. So another one that you'll want to learn is sudo zipper refresh. Now this one, I'm actually not sure if there is an abbreviation for this one because I don't use this particular incarnation of it. I have a alias for it but it's not RE so I'm not actually sure what it would be if it's not RE. So what this particular command does is it refreshes the repositories that you're subscribed to. And this is an important one. It's very similar to Ubuntu whereas if you want to know how many packages you have to update you have to first refresh the mirrors in order for apt or in this case zipper to know that number, right? So this is what you're going to want to do. Now at the end when we do a full system update zipper dup will actually do this for you but it's not always 100%. I don't know why but sometimes zipper dup will not refresh all the repositories and you'll get errors somewhere along the line during your update. So I highly recommend when you're going to do an update to do zipper refresh first and that will 100% ensure that you have all your repositories fully up to date and all the mirrors in the cache and all that stuff. That's what this command does. It does take a little longer the more repositories you're subscribed to. So as you can see, I have a lot of repositories so it takes a little while. So just know that does take a little while if you have a whole bunch of repositories but by doing it separately you no longer have to wait for zipper dup to do that for you. So we'll talk more about zipper dup here in a minute. So that's the minimal that you should know about zipper. If you want to learn more about zipper and I've done this read the man page. This is, I don't even know how many this is what 2,500 lines of pure awesomeness and pure geekdom. And I highly recommend if you are a geek or a nerd you can check this out and read it. I have done so. It's fascinating, but it's not for everyone. But if you want to know more about zipper this is the place to learn it. Okay, so the next one is going to be one that I have a video on but it's not as in depth as I would want it to be. So we're gonna talk a little bit about this but just know that you'll want to do some of your own research here and that is to learn about butterfess snapshots. So out of the box opensuza has butterfess as its default file system. And why that's good is because it allows you to have snapshots. Now basically snapshots, you can think of those things as a snapshot moment of time of your system. Now you're not, you're supposed to use the word in the definition, I understand that. But basically what a snapshot does is it takes a picture of your root file system and your base system and stores it. And if you were to go on and mess something up or an update messes something up or you install something that's really messing around with your computer, you can use snapper which is the thing that manages snapshots to roll back to a snapshot that you know is working. So this is not a backup of your system. So just keep that in mind in the video that I'll link to in the video description. You'll know that this is not a backup because I talk about it not being a backup many times. Just know that it's not a backup. What it is is the ability to take your system from a non-working state back to a known working state very, very easily. So by default, this is enabled on OpenSUSA. So if you wanted to find out what snapshots you have, what you wanna do is do sudo snapper list. Now if you've just installed, there's a good chance that this list is going to be empty or just have one entry. I've been using OpenSUSA now for almost 250 days. So I'm gonna have quite a few. Now the more snapshots you have, the longer this is going to take. So this is going to take probably close to a minute to actually gather everything up because snapper is fairly slow in this regard. It's not actually slow when you're rolling things back. It actually does that fairly fast. But for whatever reason, the listing capability is pretty slow. So I will cut here once it pops up and I'll show you again. Okay, so this is a list of all of the snapshots that I have. Now, there are a couple things just to note here. If you use OpenSUSA for a long period of time, the more snapshots you're gonna have, I think it keeps around 20 snapshots. I'm not, you can actually configure that. I'm not sure what the default is to be honest with you. It will keep the important ones. It will shove the non-important ones away if it's not marked important. You can create ones yourself. So these are ones here listed at the top are the ones that I've created by myself. And then it also does one before every update and after every update. So every time you use either Yast or Zipper to actually do a update or an install of some package, it will create a snapshot. That way, if you need to roll back to before you installed an update or directly afterwards doesn't matter, you can do so. It keeps those and then it rotates through them so that you don't have hundreds and hundreds of these things over time. Like I said, I think it keeps about 20 of them. I'm not actually sure what the actual number is, but it doesn't keep all of them. So just to know that and if you do make your own snapshots from time to time, just to be safe, make sure you mark them as important so it doesn't actually delete those when it does its pruning. So just make sure you mark the ones you create as important if you want to. So that's the very bare minimum when it comes to ButterFS snapshots. I could go in forever about these things. I love them. But just know that you should put in some effort into researching how to use these. Watch my video on it. LearnLinuxTV has a lot of good stuff on ButterFS. You can check out his channel. I think Armando has quite a few ButterFS, but those are all arch-based. So just know that it's gonna be a little bit different. But you get the idea. Do your research on ButterFS snapshots. You'll be very happy that you did. The next one is real quick. And again, not something that applies for everybody, but OpenSUSA doesn't have all the software to your repositories. OPI and the OpenBuildService do actually provide you with a lot of software, but it's not everything. But because it's true, OpenSUSA doesn't have everything, you'll probably want to install Flatpak. So that's just done by Pseudo, Insto, Pseudo, Zipper, and then Flatpak, just like so. And then once you're done with that, you'll go through the process of doing that. You'll want to run this command here. And basically that will add the FlatHub repository for Flatpak. And then you'll want to reboot your system. That way all of the environment variables are set where they need to be. So that way you have access to Flatpak if you need it and you won't have to worry about it somewhere down the line. I would recommend doing this, but you don't have to. Another optional thing for you to do post install is to change the grub delay to zero. Now, this is not something you'll want to do if you have multiple things installed on a hard drive or on your computer. If you have multiple things installed on your hard drive or computer, things like windows, your dual booting windows, or your dual booting another Linux distro, if that happens to be the case, you'll want to just skip this step because you'll want that delay so you can actually change between things to boot to. If all you have on your machine is OpenSUSA, you can go to bootloader, wait for it to do its bootloader thing, which will take a little bit, go to bootloader options, and then you're going to want it to change this here, timeout to zero. And then you'll just hit OK, and it will do its thing. And then the next time you reboot into OpenSUSA, it will just skip the boot process altogether. Again, you'll only want to do this if you only have OpenSUSA installed on your system. If you have other things, you'll want to skip this step. And it's also not necessarily, if that eight seconds doesn't bother you, you can also skip this step if you just prefer to stay there, whatever. I do it because I'd rather save those eight seconds and all I have on the system is OpenSUSA. So the last one on the list, number 10, is to do a software update. Now, normally this is the first thing you do on a system, but I've had you do several other things because it's going to make zipper faster, and it's good to know things about what you're doing before you do them. I think that that's true pretty much about everything, but in this case, we've saved it till last. Now, you can do this through Yes, if you want to, you just go to the appropriate place in Yes, and it will tell you exactly how to do the software updates. But I always do things through the terminal because I'm a nerd. So the way you do a system update on OpenSUSA, specifically on tumbleweed, is going to be pseudo zipper DUP. Now, this basically is just going to do a distro upgrade. That's what the DUP stands for. Now, you can just do zipper up, but it's going to cause you some problems. If you're on Leap, pseudo zipper up is what you're going to want to use. If you're on tumbleweed, pseudo zipper DUP is for sure what you're going to want to use because pseudo zipper up is just going to do the bare minimum. DUP is going to make sure you update everything. Now, there's a flag here that you're probably going to want to enable. And it's called dash dash allow vendor change. The one thing I've learned about OpenSUSA over the course of using for the last 250 days is that packages change repositories all the time. And sometimes it's for weird reasons. Sometimes it's just because one repository has a different version that one particular dependency is asking for. So it has to change the location or the source of the dependency that it's trying to download. And it won't do this by default. What it will do instead is ask you package by package. Are you sure you want to change the repositories for this, this and this? That gets annoying really, really fast. So pseudo zipper DUP dash dash allow vendor change will allow zipper to manage that all for you. I highly recommend using this particular setup for pseudo zipper DUP, okay? Now, if you remember all the way back at the beginning when we changed some stuff in the zip.com file there is a line in there that will do this by default. But I prefer to have the option of managing that. So I always do it manually just because I'm weird that way but you can if you want to make it automatic you can do that in the zipper configuration file. So once you hit this, it's going to do this. It's gonna ask you for your password. And then again, I've already done a refresh on all the repositories. So it shouldn't have to do basically anything. And this is gonna show me all of the things that I had to install, which is by the way, something to note, okay? If you have a lot of repositories enabled and you have a lot of stuff installed and the more stuff you have installed the more updates you're going to get. Specifically, if you have KDPlasma you're gonna get a lot of updates. So just yesterday I did an update that had 1300 packages to install. Now some of that was the plasma stuff some of it was GHC, some of it was GCC getting an update. And it does that. That's just the way Open Suiza kind of is. Package is everything in smaller packages. And a lot of times you're gonna find yourself having 400, 500, 1000 upgrades and it's going to be more the longer you use Open Suiza. So don't be scared by this but just keep it in mind. So in this case I have 219 packages which again I just did an update yesterday with 1300. So this is kind of nuts. So you hit yes here and it's gonna do its thing. That's all it's gonna do. It'll take a few minutes. I've had updates take upwards of 30 minutes. It's really going to depend basically on your internet speed specifically during this portion here. And again, we've done basically everything we can do to speed zipper up. It's not that slow, okay? But it seems slow because it doesn't have parallel downloads. But basically those are the 10 things I have for you when it comes to making sure the Open Suiza runs properly for you once you install it. Now there are other things that I could have talked about including making sure you have the browser that you want, how to use the software centers, all that stuff. But that's dysdooragnostic. A lot of the stuff would be the same no matter what distro you're using. So I don't think I need to cover here. The stuff that I covered here today is mostly Open Suiza specific. So just know that this is for Open Suiza and a lot of the stuff that you've learned over the course of installing other distros applies to Open Suiza as well. So installing your browser, installing your favorite office software, whatever. If it doesn't already come pre-installed, just head to your software center or to Yast if you want to learn that, learn Yast and install those things from there. So that's it for this video. If you have thoughts on this or if you're an Open Suiza user and you have things that you want to add, leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Masset on our Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast. You can also head on over to the store which is available at shop.deleniscast.org. There you'll find hats and hoodies and t-shirts and desk mats and all sorts of stuff. All the stuff that's there, all the proceeds from those sales go directly towards making more Linux content for you guys. So thank you so very much for doing that if you already have. It's really very much appreciated. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube because they're all absolutely amazing without you. The channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly, honestly guys, I appreciate it. So very, very much. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.