ReallyZen

Which you should absolutely do even if you snapshot the eff out of your system. What about hardware failure, eh? Can’t snap that nvidia shit can you?

Tumbleweed does it, comes preconfigured out of the box. TBH I’m trying to get the same on Arch & fail. The snapshot-before-change are easy enough, but reverting is where I fail.

Si does tumbleweed, two-clicks rollback from the GRUB menu

THIS!

Not one more repository to add, sign, reload at each update. And can get compromised.

Not one more piece of software to run that may, or may not, run properly (looking at you ProtonVPN)

Just download the wireguard or openvpn configs to some desired exit points, load them into NetworkManager as described, and BINGO you have an integrated way of switching desired location, a visual icon in the taskbar confirming your status, and no extra hassle.

Did you know that qbittorrent can be told to only work if the VPN is on? There are places where it matters.

And to answer your question, no, that is not normal. If a piece of software isn’t available for your distribution, then consider finding another. Like, here, using NetworkManager to do the job!

Mac. Why the eff can I not remove StockMarket, Weather, Chess (and so many more)… On an Audio WorkStation dedicated to Studio / Live work? Even in terminal, command line from rescue mode with permissions butchered. Argh.

I’d push this further: I install what I need now, and then install anything else when needed. Old installs get bloated because of shit we pull over time. A new one has to be fresh. When testing a new distro you wanna see it at its (default) best.

I already installed 6 (the Tree) on my… Gnome laptop. As opposite to one of the feedbacks on the competition page said about the Night version, I don’t care about legibility of my desktop items huhuhu.

The Tumbleweed installer is great, the general feel of the distro is polished, modern, up-to-date and efficient.

As other people have said, use the terminal to update both flatpaks and packages.

One main reason I went back to Arch BTW is that there aren’t, contrary to the old self a declaration by Suse, that many software available for my use case, so I ended up with tons of ppa’s, sorry, Suse Vendors who relied on each others for libraries, and it eventually broke down my system when some stuff wasn’t available but was required, while some may be available from 4 different, private, repos.

So I found software management a nightmare: where to find, which one to choose from? Looking for stuff in yast, then in gnome-software, then in software.opensuse.org, then on the Build Service… Clicking bliindly to trust keys from people with personal repos titled “Use At Your Own Risk”. Updating that mess then was complicated, and slow because gnome-software would lock yast while checking stuff in the background. I had to kill it, even just to relaunch it to search for stuff.

But Tumbleweed installs Snapper on Btrfs by default, so rolling back shouldn’t be a problem? True, and I did it and it’s just delicious, fuck up your system, wind back in two clicks… That is, unless btrfs snapshots didn’t got unruly, and in it’s default settings ate up all my disk space, forcing me to destroy that great system.

What annoyed me most here wasn’t the software all-over-the-place mess, but that the default, factory setting of a great system they themselves contributed to the Linux world wouldn’t be working 6 months down the line on a small disk (30Gb). Thanks to the Arch Wiki I know better now, and it is easily manageable, but it was too late for me.

Went back to Arch, with snapper, snap-pac, grub-btrfs, snapper-rollback. Can’t yet wind back like in Suse at all, currently at VM number 9, trying again, wish me luck.

TL;DR: a rolling release from a reputable company with one-click rollback is a perfect solution if you keep your system relatively standard.

zypper!

Generated my GRUB configuration file as grub.conf

That took a stupid while to realize.

My proposition here is that your machine (current mac address) will be once online, through a location used once, with dns-leak protection - yes, your machine will be fingerprinted once, and if the only thing you do when using this particular config is pulling software from the opensuse repos, and pay attention to only ever after live your online life with the spoofed mac and another VPN location, connecting both gonna be near impossible. Who’s gonna fingerprint you anyway, if really the only use of the network is the Suse installer pulling rpm’s from its own repos? At that, Nord isn’t worst than any other since the internet provider for the connection can only sniff you going to some X location for an hour or so.

Extra Paranoid Step, do it from any public free WiFi across town or something.

You know, at the end of the day, fingerprinting works very well even behind the standard privacy protection we all know about. An interesting concept I read here was that the more addons / special stuff you add to protect you, the more “unique” is your profile, enabling efficient tracking!

Good luck with all this

Tumbleweed/ProtonVPN here

I’m guessing your use case require extra steps towards anonymity.

2 ways :

1. Download the needed .rpm from software.opensuse.org from another machine, transfer via USB, install manually from terminal or YAST ; it is gonna be tedious since dependencies will be missing and you will have to pull them, transfer them, install them manually.

2. (cleaner). It’s probably easier to wipe your system, re-install while connected behind either a PiHole or a VPN on your phone using HotSpot + a decent DNS provider and setting the VPN to target an unusual location. This time, do configure properly your machine including extra software that may not be available on the offline installation media. Reboot, configure, don’t use previous VPN location ever again.