 Over the course of the last 100 days, I've been using OpenSUSA as my primary distro on my main machine and it is awesome. I've made several different videos talking about how awesome it is, but today we're not going to talk about how awesome OpenSUSA is. Instead, we're going to talk about a tool that OpenSUSA comes with and that is YAST. Now YAST, the name itself stands for yet another setup tool and it has been around since 1996. Now to put that into a little bit of perspective, there are many members of my audience who weren't even alive in 1996 and that's quite a long time ago. Myself, I was 11 years old, so I was around, but I definitely was not doing anything with YAST. Let's put it that way. So YAST is actually older than OpenSUSA. OpenSUSA came out in 2005, YAST was in 1996. So just to give you a little bit of history there, YAST is quite old, but you're probably wondering, what the hell is YAST and what do I do with it? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today, but before we do, if you leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it, it would really help the channel. So what is YAST? YAST is a, and I'm going to just kind of paraphrase this, it's a one-stop shop for literally everything, video over, I guess. It's really hard to nail down what YAST actually is because it does a ton of stuff. So we're going to talk about some of the features today, and when I say some, I mean some because there's no possible way in a 20 or 30 minute video, I could possibly talk about all of the features. Hopefully, we can talk about some of the main ones, and that's what we're going to try to do. So let's actually take a look at YAST itself, and we'll start here on my OpenSUSA desktop. So I'm going to open up YAST, if I can spell, which I can't do. And now we'll talk about some of the downsides of YAST, and this is one of them. We'll talk about that later, but it does require your pseudo-passage in order to open up. So this right here is YAST, and as you can tell, it does settings stuff. So basically, you can think of, and this is not 100% accurate, you can think of YAST as a settings panel. It's also, however, a package manager. So as a front end for Zipper, in the case of OpenSUSA, the Zipper is the package manager that OpenSUSA uses and SUSA uses, and YAST is the GUI front end for that mechanism to install software. So it's a settings panel. It's a package manager. It's a user group management system. It will control your firewall. You can create virtual machines inside of it. You can control a lot of the hypervisor stuff. Basically anything you'd want to do on Linux, you can do instead of YAST. Now obviously, this is a SUSA or an OpenSUSA specific tool. It's not going to help you much if you're on a different distro. I have never seen anybody even try to use it on a different distro. I doubt you could, although, I mean, someone probably out there is wanting to prove me wrong, have at it, I suppose, but it's an OpenSUSA and SUSA specific tool. So if you're using it, this is what you're going to kind of find. So just in general, it's a tool that does basically everything you want to do inside of Linux. If you want to change your host name, for example, you can click on host name. It will open up another window, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. But you can, from right here, change your host name to whatever you want to change it to. Now most people, when they want to change their host name, will open up a terminal and use host name CTL, just like so. And then they'll put the name in that they want to use. Right? That's what they normally do. They go to the specific file in Etsy to change your host name. But if you're more interested in using the GUI, you can do that from here. Another thing that you can do, obviously, is install packages. So if you go to software management here, it will open up again another window, and it will refresh their repositories, and then you're here in this interface now. Here's where we start talking about the first negative things about yes. The UI is not at all modern, so you're just going to have to forgive that unless you want to use a different tool. So if you're going to use yes, you're going to have to put up with the UI. But in this case, this is one of the most powerful GUI software management tools in existence, in my opinion. You can do literally everything here that you would want to do in terms of managing the software on your machine, whether it's install it or uninstall it or manage the versioning of it. You can do all that stuff here. So let's just say, for example, you wanted to search for desktop environments. So you'd go here, you'd go to patterns, and you could then see basically any of the desktop environments that OpenSUSE has in its repository. So if you want to install enlightenment, you could do so. LXD, LXCute, XFC, KDE, whatever you wanted to do. And obviously, there's a lot of desktop software as well that you can install via a pattern as well. But usually when I use a pattern, what I want to do is install a desktop environment where I want to manage it. It also has Sway here as well. So that's one powerful tool that you can use in terms of installing software. But if you just wanted to search for a specific package, so let's just say we wanted to search for audacity, like so. And then we hit search, and then it would search for audacity. We could hit the check mark here and hit accept, and it would install audacity. It has access to all of the repositories that you have installed on your computer. So not only the OpenSUSE or Tumbleweed installers, depending on where you are in terms of which version of OpenSUSE you're using. But if you're using Pacman, and then when I say Pacman, I mean P-A-C-K-M-A-N. It's a different repository for OpenSUSE, not the package manager for Arch. Those things are different. If you have different repositories installed on your computer from the OpenBuild service, that will be handled here as well. Anything that you have installed on your computer in terms of repositories will show up inside of the search so you can get packages from different places. Another thing that I like about this particular package management way of doing things is that you can install multiple packages at the same time. There aren't many GUI package managers that do that. Pamac on Manjaro does it. The software boutique in Ubuntu Mate will do it. Most other GUI software managers will only allow you to install one package at a time, or at least one bundle at a time. So if you install Audacity, you'll probably get the dependencies or whatever, but you're not going to be able to install Audacity, KDNLive, and whatever all at the same time. You can do that here inside of Yes. So package management is a big part of what Yes does. And if you're going to use OpenSusa and you're not interested in managing your packages via zipper in the terminal, this is the way you're going to be doing it. And it is super powerful. The UI, not great. We'll talk about that more later, but it is super powerful. Another thing that's really cool that you can do here is if you find a package that you never want to install it. So let's just say, for example, you never want to update to something, you can set that to taboo, and it will never install that package. So if you want to state a specific version of Python or whatever, you can do that. I will say that you don't do the software update from software management. You do that from the online update portion here. So those two are separated. You can also manage the software repositories themselves inside of Yes. Just like other settings managers, you can manage the printer, the scanner, your keyboard layout as well. You can change the settings for your bootloader, your date and time, your language, your network settings. And you can manage your petitions right here from Yes as well. But it takes it a step further in that it also allows you to manage the services, right? So you can change and manage the running services. So if we click on this, it'll take a little bit because it's going to actual query all of the services that are running on your system. So here you can actually see all of the services that are installed on your system, what their status is. And you can change those statuses if you want to. So you can change the status of those services to start manually or on boot or not at all. You can change the active status. You can start them from here as well. Now, one thing you'll want to know is that you want to know what you're doing if you're going to mess around with this stuff. So if you are in a situation where you don't know what a service is and it's running, you'll probably want to leave it running. Otherwise, you'll start messing your system up, right? So you'll want to make sure you know what you're doing if you're going to start messing around with this. Now, OpenSUSE uses system D. One of the reasons why YAST is able to do this is because it's using system D. Other systems, while you can list the services obviously aren't going to be as detailed as this just because that's the way system D is. It has a ton of stuff and information available to it and allows YAST to put all that stuff in a GUI format, right? Now, I will say that getting to this point does take a little while. I cut most of the wait time, but it does take quite a while to query all of the services that are on your machine and find out the status of them. So just know that this portion of YAST is kind of slow, but that has more to do with system D, I believe, than YAST itself. So I'm going to go ahead and get out of this and we'll go back here. It will also allow you to change settings in the SysConfig configuration files. And I'm going to avoid that because I don't want to mess up my system even just a little bit. Again, there are certain parts of YAST that you just kind of want to avoid if you have no clue what you're doing. And in this situation, I've never edited any of the SysConfig files ever and I don't want to. I don't want to touch it. So we'll just avoid that. So another thing that you can do is manage all of your network services. So again, we talked about host names earlier, you can change your host name. You can change the NTP configuration, which has to do with time and date and automatic updating of the time and date and stuff. You can change your proxy and remote administration tools. Like if you're having a VNC situation where you need to remote into someone else's computer or allow others into your computer, you can use that here. Same thing with SAMBA. SAMBA is integrated right inside of YAST. So if you want to set up SAMBA shares, you can do so right here in the GUI. So actually take a look at this. You can change the workgroup or domain name. So we got to remember that SAMBA is a Windows technology, right? So it's meant to be used between Linux and Windows. So that's one of the reasons why workgroup is here. So you can change the workgroup name. You can hit next. You can change the service configuration so that it's either on or off and whether or not it boots on start. You can also open up the firewall. You can actually go up here. You can add shares so you can create folders and what things are shared. You can change the identity. So you're going to this is going to be where you're managing your user, the trusted domains and LDAP, LDAP settings. All this stuff can be edited right from a GUI. And let me tell you guys, I don't use SAMBA anymore because it's always been a pain in my ass. But if you are going to have to manage SAMBA doing it from a GUI is actually 1000 times better than trying to figure out the configuration settings, managing all the services yourself and all this stuff is just in one place. And you can do all of your shares directly from this interface as well. And that's just super cool. So I'm going to go ahead and hit cancel because I'm not using SAMBA at all. And I never plan to do so again, but that's not a yes problem. That's going to be a problem because of SAMBA being terrible. Security and users is a is a section where you can manage your firewall and your user management. It also has options for app armor, which from what I can tell, I've never actually managed any of the app armor stuff myself, but it is an extension of firewall technology that allows you to basically curtail what access applications have to certain functions of your computer. So it is it's obviously security centric. And if you want to, this is the wrong word, I'm sure, but containerize your applications so that they don't have access to certain portions of your computer, that's the internet or certain ports on your computer or whatever, you can do so with an app armor. It also has a security settings panel. So you can change from here, you can change boot settings, login settings, user addition, all the stuff that you do to control the security of your system right here in a one stop shop. Again, I would caution you to not mess with any of this stuff if you don't know what you're doing. So a lot of the stuff I wouldn't touch if I in this absolutely knew exactly what that I needed to touch it. So I'm just going to kind of a bore out of this and just back way quietly without messing up anything because I don't want to mess around with the network or security settings. So all the security stuff there is highly intensive and very broad. So if you basically again, anything that you want to do on your system, you can do right here from yes, the next section is virtualization here. You can use the ask to create virtual machines that uses KVM and hypervisor. Now, one thing I will tell you is that the way you install KVM and hypervisor stuff on open Suza is almost a requirement to use yes. So there's a terminal. There's a two e version of yes that you have to use in order to install the virtual machine stuff. I'm not going to go through any of that stuff here. It's not a good interface for installing or managing any of that stuff to be honest with you. Once you get installed through yes, I always just use virtual manager to create stuff. So I avoid the virtualization stuff. It's not that you can't do it from here. Mostly what this section here is going to be for is installing additional dependencies and management tools for KVM and Zen if that's what you use. So that's the virtualization section. You can also see a lot of your logs here at the at the bottom. You can see the VAR log messages. There's also system D journal, which is journal CTL basically in a GUI format. So if you are having problems with your machine and you don't know the commands to see the logs, you can come here to actually see those. You can also see the file system snapshots from here. So if every time opens Suza does an update, it creates a butterFS snapshot. You can see the snapshots that you have from here as well. So if we click on this, we can actually see those. It's going to show me all the snapshots that I have, including the ones that I've done manually and so on and so forth. So that is the butterFS snapshots that you can see inside of a GUI. And obviously all the stuff here has alternatives in terminal, right? And that's kind of the point. What they've done is basically made it so that YAST is a GUI front end for a lot of terminal commands. So managing your virtual machines, managing your network and host names and NTP servers and your boot loader and your date and time and your system keyboard and your printer. All that stuff has terminal commands and things that go along with it in order to set that kind of stuff up, right? What they've done is shoved all that stuff inside of one place at one stop shop, if you will, so that you can manage that stuff. So overall, YAST is fantastic, right? I think that if you are a GUI focused or GUI centric person, your workflow is much more GUI centric than anybody else's. Or you avoid the terminal like the plague, whatever is your situation, everyone has their own way of doing things. YAST is a great place and a great tool for that type of user. Now let's talk about some of the negatives. And honestly, there's two big negatives. First is that it does a lot. That is its best quality and it's also its biggest flaw. Chances are it does everything that you want it to do, but because it's set up the way that it is, it can be kind of hard to find the things that you need to do because there's just so much stuff here. And you kind of have to know, again, there are several spots here where you really have to know what you're doing in order to use it. Even the software management tool, if we go back here, this UI is not what you would call user friendly. Let's put it that way. This is not a user friendly interface whatsoever. Also, not everybody knows what a pattern actually is. Patterns in this case are similar to groups on Arch, if that's what you want to need to know. But the idea here, or at least what I was trying to say is that the user interface, not that great. This isn't just because I'm using a window manager. So this looks basically the same if you're using it on plasma or, you know, it's going to look this way. So the UI is the second biggest thing. So the first one was that there is quite a lot of stuff here and it can be super confusing. But most of that confusion, I would say I would lay actually at the UI. The UI, this is a piece of software that looks like it was developed in 1996. And while it has been updated through years and it looks a little bit better than it did when it first started, it's still a not pretty UI and even beyond the aesthetics of it, it's not an intuitive UI. It's just not. And I will say that in some places that's not a big deal because the thing that you're doing is pretty simple. But in other places like the package management or the services manager or the security center, a lot of those things do a lot of stuff just on their own. And the more stuff that each of these things do, the more the UI kind of gets in the way because not only is it old, but also it's just not intuitive. There's a lot of things there that you kind of have to know what you're doing in order to actually use. And that can sometimes remove the benefits of using a GUI, right? So one of the benefits supposedly of using a GUI is that it's simpler than using the terminal because you don't have to know any of the commands, right? It's just clicking a button and go do what you need to do. The problem with a unintuitive UI is that you don't know which buttons to push because there are so many buttons, right? And the buttons aren't necessarily in the place you'd expect the buttons to be. And that kind of takes away some of the benefits of there being a UI GUI tool in the first place. Not always, but sometimes. So that's the biggest critique I have of, yes, is that the UI is just not as intuitive as it should be. But two things about that, just in defense of OpenSUSE, because I'm a fanboy. First off, OpenSUSE is not a brand new user distro. If you're new to Linux, you're probably not going to be using OpenSUSE. Now, it's not Gen2 or Linux from scratch or anything like that. So it's not that far gone in terms of noob friendliness, but it's not for people who are probably meant to be using Linux Mint or Ubuntu, right? So that's one thing in defense. Another thing in defense of it is that it is, you know, kind of meant for nerds. Even if you are a GUI nerd, it's still meant for nerds. You're meant to go in here and explore and find out what you need to do. And that's just kind of the way it's meant to work. So it's not meant to be new user friendly. At least that's the way that I've always kind of taken it. Now, another thing, just one other small critique that I have is that in summits, the stuff here is pretty slow. So if you click on security center, it's going to take a good minute to load. Same thing with the services manager that took a good 45 minutes, not 45 minutes, 45 seconds to a minute to load. Now, whether that's because of YAST or because of underlying system things that just take a long time to run, that's going to depend on what tool it is. Some things load instantaneously, so it's not always slow. But in certain situations, when it has a lot of things that it has to query, it can be pretty slow. And again, I think that's mostly because of the underlying stuff underneath it instead of the tool itself. So overall, that is YAST. Now, obviously, I did not go full detail into every single feature that YAST has. That would take much longer than the 25 minutes or so that I've been talking. But you can get the idea of what YAST is. It is a one-stop shop for literally everything. I can't think of very many things that YAST doesn't do. It does basically everything you could possibly want to do on Linux if you're using OpenSUSA. That is a spectacular tool in my book, whether it has flaws or not. And everything has flaws where it's made by humans, you know, it's going to have flaws. So that is YAST. Now, I will say just to wrap all of this up, I don't use YAST. So as cool as I think YAST is, I personally don't use it. I'm an old school Linux user and also I'm a super nerd. So everything that I do, I prefer to do in the terminal. So if I'm going to install packages, I'm going to use zipper. It's just the way that I just much prefer to use the terminal. It doesn't mean I think YAST is bad. I think YAST is fantastic. I just prefer to do as much of my system management stuff inside the terminal just because it is transferable between distros. So for the most part, right, if I want to install packages on a distro, I can just go to the terminal, use that distros package manager and, you know, there are things there that I learn I can transfer from one distro to another. Same thing if I want to change the host name on, if I want to change the host name on Fedora or on OpenSUSA or on Ubuntu, the process is basically the same. So I can, I can transfer that knowledge from one place to another. Whereas if I just focus on YAST, that's very OpenSUSA specific. And I've brought all of that baggage with me. Like I learned all that stuff, how to do all that stuff inside of the terminal. Therefore, I'm just going to use the terminal. But that doesn't take away from how awesome YAST is. And if you are an OpenSUSA user or if you're using SUSA, obviously you can use YAST and be perfectly content. And it's just fantastic for you. And you have a one-stop shop for literally everything you need to do to manage your system. So that is YAST. If you have thoughts on YAST, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd really appreciate it. It really does help the channel. If you haven't already, leave a thumbs up. That also really helps the channel. And it's also very easy. The button is like literally right below my face. Hit that thumbs up. It helps the channel. You can follow me on Master's Honor Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon on Patreon.com slash Linuxcast. 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