openSUSE 13.2 - Plasma 5

[ronw]

I guess I will finally be learning something about btrfs. It's the default filesystem in a current (13.2) install.

It wasn't dead simple, but I managed to select "Plasma 5 Base" instead of KDE (which would have been KDE4) by clicking the Software category on the installation summary page and clicking through a few screens.

Polished and pretty, but wow does it install a lot of ... stuff.

[MrSteve]

downloading as i write this. this maybe a better option then debian 8 kde if kubuntu ceases ...

[SteveRiley]

wow does it install a lot of ... stuff.

I've noticed that too. In some cases, even multiple versions of the same packages.

[otisklt]

The auto partitioner on this is pretty nice, it proposed a brtfs partition for / and an xfs for /home, and subvolumes for many of the / subdirectories.
Giving that a go for the sake of trying something new.

[GreyGeek]

I played with openSUSE 13.2 a few days ago and wrote about it in a thread here. I wanted to test its btrfs fs so I replaced XFS on /home with btrfs. My conclusion was that snapper had improved considerably since it tested the Kubuntu version a year ago, but it still didn't measure up, IMHO, to the @ & @home paradigm used by Kubuntu.

[oshunluvr]

btrfs is awesome but you lose half the benefits if you don't use subvolumes. I keep hoping the install program maintainers figure this out.

[GreyGeek]

One flaw with OpenSUSE's coding and use of ksnapper, related to how it's subvolumes are laid out, is posted here. One thing great about Kubuntu's Btrfs configuration is that you can put your snapshots of @ and @home at the same level,I.e., <FS_ROOT>. The only way to reach them is to mount the device Btrfs partition on /mnt as or with root permission. Snapper puts its snapshot subdirs under / and /home.

Also, because app installations often install files in home in addition to locations under root, it is best to take snapshots of both @ and @home at the same time before doing something that might fail or do damage, or have results you are not happy with.

[oshunluvr]

I still do my snapshots manually (cron job or CLI) but I use a root volume folder to store them - for neatness's sake. So my root looks like this:

stuart@office:~/Downloads/samsung_magician_dc-v1.0_rtm_p2/64bin$ ll /mnt/samsung
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root   root   382 May 28 12:21 @Kubuntu_14_04
drwxr-xr-x 1 root   root    48 Jan 25 16:21 @Kubuntu_14_04_home
drwxr-xr-x 1 root   root   284 Jul  9 13:20 @Kubuntu_15_04
drwxr-xr-x 1 root   root    52 Jul  9 11:06 @Kubuntu_15_04_home
drwxr-xr-x 1 root   root     0 May  9 08:51 snapshots
drwxr-x--- 1 stuart stuart   0 Feb 21 07:14 @stuart

For most snaps. I delete them as soon as I realize they're no longer needed.

[GreyGeek]

Snapper would label those snapshots as singletons ("single"), and that's what I treat my snapshot as.

root@jerry-Aspire-7739:/home/jerry# vdir /mnt
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 226 Jul 14 11:05 @
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  30 Jul 16 12:55 @home
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  30 Jul 14 06:34 @home_snapshot_20150714
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  30 Jul 14 06:34 @home_snapshot_before_POL_install
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 226 Jul 14 11:05 @_snapshot_20150714
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 226 Jul 14 11:05 @_snapshot_before_POL_install
root@jerry-Aspire-7739:/home/jerry#

Rather than "undochange" between a pre & post snapshot I use the mv command and reboot.

[GreyGeek]

I noticed that snapper in the repository was .18 but on openSUSE it was .22 so I went looking for the latest version equal or higher than .22 that would run on Kubuntu 14.04. I found .2.6-0 here. I didn't not install the zypp plugin because Kubuntu does not have zypper, but I used QAtp from the context menu of Dolphin to install them one at a time starting with the libs. I've started testing it on / and /home. I set Timeline to "no" to avoid needless snapshots. No problems so far. I'll continue to play with it and see how much better the .2.6 is over ours or openSUSE 13.2's .2.2.

[GreyGeek]

Moved post to here.