Thanks to the EXTON OpSuS Rpi Linux distribution

Nov 26, 2018 18:27 GMT  ·  By

GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton has made a new distro for the tiny Raspberry Pi single-board computers, this time based on the popular openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system and the lightweight Xfce desktop environment.

Meet EXTON OpSuS Rpi, a variant of Arne Exton's old EXTON OpSuS Tumbleweed distribution optimized for Raspberry Pi devices. It's a "remaster” of the official OpenSuSE Tumbleweed ISO image for Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, using the Xfce desktop environment by default and all the necessary packages for daily use.

"I did it mostly because it’s fun," said Arne Exton in today's announcement. "My version [EXTON OpSuS Rpi] has one big advantage though since you can enjoy sound. Good if you like YouTube, for example. I’ve also added some “necessary” packages and prevented installations of all KDE packages."

When asked why he created yet another Linux distro, the developer said that he did it mostly for fun, and recommends EXTON OpSuS Rpi to advanced and enthusiast Linux users only as they might need to run various commands in a terminal emulator from time to time to enable things in the system or optimize various parts.

Powered by Linux kernel 4.19

This brings us to the performance of the EXTON OpSuS Rpi distribution on the tiny Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ single-board computer, which doesn't appear to be as fast as the developer would have liked even though the lightweight, resource-friendly Xfce desktop environment is being used as default graphical interface and the system is powered by the latest Linux 4.19 kernel series.

For example, when watching a video on YouTube in the Mozilla Firefox web browser, you'll have to be patient for it to load the video. Creating a SWAP partition might speed things up, said the developer, who also found out that running the system as root the overall performance is much better.

However, being based on openSUSE Tumbleweed, EXTON OpSuS Rpi uses its package base and the rolling release model, so you'll be able to try a more lightweight window manager instead of Xfce, such as Awesome, i3, or Bspwm. You can see EXTON OpSuS Rpi Build 181126 in action below and download it from the developer's website.

EXTON OpSuS Rpi live
EXTON OpSuS Rpi live
EXTON OpSuS Rpi as root
EXTON OpSuS Rpi as root

EXTON OpSuS Rpi (2 Images)

EXTON OpSuS Rpi live
EXTON OpSuS Rpi as root
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