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During my time with Phosh on PinePhone and openSUSE Tumbleweed, I have stumbled on a couple of issues that made clear that the experience still needed some polish. The parts that are developed for Phosh are designed well. You can see that the experience is optimized for those parts. Scrolling is relatively smooth. The general design direction is clean and functional.

Why is that phone so special? My wife asked me. I was exited like a child with my shiny new toy: the PinePhone KDE Community Edition. For me this was a very exiting event. I was very curious how the PinePhone would feel in real life. I expected it to be very plastic feeling. It did feel that way, but it didn’t feel cheap. It was well constructed.

During the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference, there was a Conditional No Go given on the proposal to create an in-between release called openSUSE Leap 15.2.1. That means that the Jump and Leap unification will most likely happen in Leap 15.3. I think that this is a reasonable decision, which provides a better timeline for the openSUSE and SUSE teams to work out all of the outstanding issues.

Recently I had an experience that let me re-evaluate my approach to Security on Linux. I thought I was being hacked! This incident forced me to rethink my security. I didn’t have a virus scanner installed. I was on the verge of using a password manager. However, the thought of needing to change over 100 passwords, caused me to wait for ‘the right time’. I have waited for over 2 years. Now was the time to change. I decided to look for solutions that were native to Linux.

I have recently bought a 14" laptop, the HP Pavilion 14-ce0830nd. This is a mid-range laptop. Installation of openSUSE Leap 15.2 was very easy. And installation of a dual boot system with Windows 10 was easy as well. The laptop has an attractive look and feel. The display, speakers, keyboard and external ports are all good. The touchpad is too sensitive, but this can be adjusted in the KDE settings. The machine has enough RAM, enough storage and the hard drives are performant. The Intel CPU/GPU is great. Which means that this is a great machine for multitasking.

openSUSE Leap 15.2 has entered the Beta phase on the 25th February 2020. I have recently installed this on my laptop to check it out. Leap 15.2 will coincide with SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop 15 Service Pack 2. Both Leap and SLED share a lot of underlying packages, so this will be (again) a rock solid release. openSUSE Leap 15.2 features many big updates. In this blog I will describe them in detail.

When I setup my first Wordpress website, I didn’t make an installation instruction. I have made this guide alongside creating my second Wordpress website. In this tutorial I have incorporated all the learnings from my previous experience. This tutorial is likely to be very beneficial for all Linux beginners, who want to install WordPress from scratch on a VPS server running openSUSE Tumbleweed.

There are several ways to update openSUSE Leap. However, there is one way that has served me the best over the last 10 years using openSUSE. And this is via the YaST Software Management graphical (GUI) interface.

In my previous attempt to upgrade to openSUSE Leap 15.1, I had experienced issues with my AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB graphics card. The drivers were not working, which resulted in a black screen during the upgrade process. I needed to consider a different solution. I decided to install an ASUS Phoenix GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. In this article, I describe the results of upgrading to openSUSE Leap 15.1 and installing the proprietary NVIDIA drivers.

On the 22nd of May, openSUSE released Leap 15.1. A couple of days later I took the plunge to update my laptop and desktop from openSUSE Leap 15.0. In this blog, I will detail my update experience.

openSUSE Leap 15.1 is almost ready for release! However, there is not much buzz around this release. When I tried to establish what was new in Leap 15.1, I started to understand why. Leap 15.1 mostly features minor updates. Still there are updates that are noteworthy. This article describes the new features for openSUSE desktop users.

The email that I received last month, revoking my openSUSE Membership, is an indication that the openSUSE community can do more to retain its users. This article explores my views on how to attract, engage and retain openSUSE users, community members and contributors. The openSUSE community should have a better Marketing strategy to make the Journey from User to Contributor a smoother experience. To try to get the roadblocks out of the way for the people that want to be informed or be involved.

I like Dolphin, the default KDE file manager, a lot. I have used it for over 9 years. There are many features that I use regularly that I wouldn’t want to live without. In this post, I like to share my personal top 5. Some features are more obvious, others are hidden features.

When I was starting in the world of amateur digital photography, I learned about 2 software programs that everybody was using: Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom. In the Free and Open Source world, there are 2 amazing alternatives: GIMP and Darktable. For many people, getting started can be daunting. Therefore I like to present the absolute basics of photo editing with Darktable.

Because of the incredible bargains during the Steam summer / winter sales, I have acquired 42 games over the last 6 years. My old openSUSE system was never able to play these games in a decent manner. Intel HD Graphics 4000 will only get you so far... I have looked into building a new AMD PC, which would allow me to run Linux / Steam games at high settings and 1080p. Recently I noticed a promotion for the HP Pavilion Power 580 desktop, equipped with a Ryzen 5 1400 processor and with a Radeon RX 580 graphics card. In this review my experience of this PC running openSUSE.

As is the case for many open source enthusiasts, I am the go-to person in my family for solving PC issues. I enjoy messing with computers and solving technical challenges. Over the last few weeks, I had a lot of Windows encounters. There are 3 reasons to write about this: 1) I found a great tool to retrieve the Windows license key from openSUSE and I like to write about this tool. 2) I encountered a lot of driver issues on Windows, I like to share the problem and the way to solve it. 3) The grass is not greener on the other side.

I watch a lot of BBC Gardeners World, which gives me a lot of inspiration for making changes to my own garden. I tried looking for a free and open source program for designing gardens in the openSUSE package search. The only application that I found was Rosegarden, a MIDI and Audio Sequencer and Notation Editor. Using google, I found Edraw Max, an all-in-one diagram software. This included a Floor planner, including templates for garden design. And there are download options for various Linux distributions, including openSUSE.

If you search online for “Best Panorama Stitching software 2018”, chances are very high that you find an article that mentions Hugin. The reason is that this is one of the best programs to stitch photos for Linux, MacOS and Windows. And it is free and open source! The criticism is that it is aimed at professional users and that it can be a bit overwhelming for new users. This article will provide you with a rundown on how to use Hugin.

I have recently bought a new 14? laptop, the ASUS VivoBook X402NA-FA112T as it is called in the Netherlands. On the ASUS.com website, this model is known as the ASUS VivoBook E402NA. Although this is a budget laptop, its a big improvement over my previous laptop (the Acer Aspire One 725). Both machines happily run openSUSE Leap 15. This review provides an overview of the new hardware and how it performs when running openSUSE Leap 15.

Have you noticed? After installing Rapid Photo Downloader from the openSUSE repositories, it doesn’t launch. As indicated in an earlier blog post, this program is really great to download your photo’s into the right folders in one go. Version 0.9.9 is a big overhaul for this application. If you want to use it right now, you need to install it using these instructions.