I have a “sidekick” machine in my cubicle that has been happily running openSUSE Leap since I started using it. It is a recovered Dell Latitude D830 with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 CPU at 2.50 GHz, 4 GiB of RAM and the Nvidia Quatro NVS 140M. It just has a standard hard disk drive for storage. I put this unit back together 3 years ago only expecting to get a year or two of use out of it. Thankfully, the way Linux, and specifically openSUSE rolls the distribution, I have far extended the life of this machine.
Since this hardware is older everything is generally supported out of the box without any tweaking. I have decided, for now, to not use the proprietary drivers and see if Nouveau will work using KDE Plasma and not lock up on me.
Installation
I downloaded the DVD Image (now released as an official version) and used SUSE ImageWriter to write it to a USB. Like virtually every other openSUSE installation, it was pretty uneventful. I did choose to do a “Nuke and pave” for this installation as I wanted to set everything up from scratch. There have been a number of changes in openSUSE since the last static release, namely, the BTRFS subvolume structure, the location of the RPM Database move and SuSEfirewall2 migration to the new firewalld. I also experimented with a number of applications on this system and just wanted to have a fresh start.
Outside of the warning of the usage of Nouveau drivers with KDE Plasma, there as nothing to note on the installation process.
First Run
To start out, I needed to ensure that I covered my bases for my preferences. Since I like to add a little Oxygen Theme into the Breeze Theme I immediately ran this in terminal:
sudo zypper install oxygen5
I also like Konqueror and one of it’s specific features, the File Size View.
sudo zypper install konqueror konqueror-plugins
Then I added the Multimedia Codecs along with VLC Player.
So far, everything seems to be working just as expected and the Nouveau drivers are holding up. I will continue to use them until I have any issues
One Week Later
I have since updated the machine to the current release version and I am still operating, trouble free. The System seems to be humming away well with the Nouveau drivers. I have tested many things I know would have caused the graphics drivers to bug out and crash X. At this point, there hasn’t been any weirdness whatsoever. The compositor is running just fine without any glitching. I have been using this machine in the same mannor as I had previously used it under openSUSE Leap 42.3 with the propriatary Nvidia drivers. Should I have an issue, I will see if the propriatary drivers fix it.
What I Like
After installing the necessary packages, all of my system settings were just as I wanted them to be. I didn’t have to fiddle around with any settings. KDE Plasma 5.12 is the Long Term Support version of the Environment and I know that from my expeirience with the transition to 5.12, it is more memory efficient than previous versions. In only one week, I haven’t run into any issues where Swap Space was needed. In monitoring the memory usage, I fluctuated between 2.8 GiB to 3.4 GiB in usage with Firefox being biggest memory hog. This has prompted me to start playing around with the Falkon web browser which I downloaded here. So far so good but I need more time to use and play with it before I can say more.
What I don’t Like
So far, I haven’t found any issues, but it has only been a week that I have been using it. Maybe, I could say, I don’t like that openSUSE doesn’t have wider adoption as it is technically very sound and very stable. I am hoping with the release of openSUSE Leap 15.0 that it will reach a wider audience.
Conclusion
openSUSE Leap 15.0 has been polished up very nicely. It it very much an incramental improvement over 42.3. The software selection meets my needs and if the software you want is not in the official repository, there is likely a repository available on the Open Build Service.
Since most of my systems are pretty low-end, I have them generally set up for specific purposes. Although I can happily run openSUSE the way I want with 2 GiB of RAM, I have come to the conclusion that in order to have a real positive experience, you need to have at least 4 GiB of RAM.
This Dell Latitude D830 is now 11 years old. It is far past it’s end of life but thanks to the all the fine engineers involved from kernel development, the applicaitons all the way to package maintainers and testers, this computer still remains very useful and not quite obsolete. I am impressed with the stability open source Nouveau graphics drivers which gives me a lot of confidence that as Nvidia abaondons the older hardware, I have options. I just may get several more years out of this machine.
Further Reading
Falkon Web Browser Download for openSUSE
The Nvidia GPU will eventually fail in that D830. Just keep that in mind before you think it will last forever.
Nothing is forever but I’ll run the machine until it functions no more.