Release Notes #

To avoid some big recommended packages from being installed, the pattern for minimal installations uses another pattern that creates conflicts with undesired packages. This pattern, patterns-openSUSE-minimal_base-conflicts, can be removed after installation.

Note that the minimal installation has no firewall by default. If you need one, install SuSEfirewall2.

Prior to installing openSUSE on a system that boots using UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), you are urgently advised to check for any firmware updates the hardware vendor recommends and, if available, to install such an update. A pre-installation of Windows 8 or later is a strong indication that your system boots using UEFI.

Background: Some UEFI firmware has bugs that cause it to break if too much data gets written to the UEFI storage area. However, there is no clear data of how much is “too much”.

openSUSE minimizes the risk by not writing more than the bare minimum required to boot the OS. The minimum means telling the UEFI firmware about the location of the openSUSE boot loader. Upstream Linux kernel features that use the UEFI storage area for storing boot and crash information (pstore) have been disabled by default. Nevertheless, it is recommended to install any firmware updates the hardware vendor recommends.

Together with the EFI/UEFI specification, a new style of partitioning arrived: GPT (GUID Partition Table). This new schema uses globally unique identifiers (128-bit values displayed in 32 hexadecimal digits) to identify devices and partition types.

Additionally, the UEFI specification also allows legacy MBR (MS-DOS) partitions. The Linux boot loaders (ELILO or GRUB 2) try to automatically generate a GUID for those legacy partitions, and write them to the firmware. Such a GUID can change frequently, causing a rewrite in the firmware. A rewrite consists of two different operations: Removing the old entry and creating a new entry that replaces the first one.

Modern firmware has a garbage collector that collects deleted entries and frees the memory reserved for old entries. A problem arises when faulty firmware does not collect and free those entries. This can result in a non-bootable system.

To work around this problem, convert the legacy MBR partition to GPT.

On openSUSE Leap 15.0, you need to uninstall the package drm-kmp-default first, before you can manually install Nvidia drivers using the .run shell script archive:

zypper rm drm-kmp-default

If you install the RPMs provided by Nvidia, you will not be affected by this issue, because in that case, the package drm-kmp-default is replaced during the driver installation automatically.

If you decide to uninstall Nvidia's driver later, make sure to reinstall the package drm-kmp-default.

For more information, see https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1044816.

The following packages are still shipped as part of the distribution but are deprecated. The packages exist to aid migration, but their use is discouraged and they may not receive updates. The packages will be removed in the next version of the distribution.

To check whether installed packages are no longer maintained: Make sure that lifecycle-data-openSUSE is installed, then use the command:

zypper lifecycle

In the past, there could be confusion over the difference between how the very similarly named systemctl subcommands reload and restart worked for AppArmor:

Unfortunately, systemd does not provide a solution within its unit file format for the issue posed by the restart scenario.

Starting with AppArmor 2.12, the command systemctl stop apparmor will not work. As a consequence, systemctl restart apparmor will now correctly reload AppArmor profiles.

To unload all AppArmor profiles, use the new command aa-teardown instead which matches the previous behavior of systemctl stop apparmor.

For more information, see https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=996520 and https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=853019.

In previous versions of openSUSE, the compose key combination allowed typing characters that were not part of the regular keyboard layout. For example, to produce “å”, you could press and release Shift–Right Ctrl and then press a twice.

In openSUSE Leap 15.0, there is no longer a predefined compose key combination because Shift–Right Ctrl does not work as expected anymore.

When using GNOME Shell together with a login manager other than GDM, such as SDDM or LightDM, the screen will not blank or lock. Additionally, switching users without logging out is not possible.

To be able to lock the screen from GNOME Shell, enable GDM as your login manager:

The codecs to play MP3 media files are shipped as part of the standard repository.

To use this decoder in gstreamer-based applications and frameworks, such as Rhythmbox or Totem, install the package gstreamer-plugins-ugly.

LibreOffice 5.3 and higher do not support legacy Type-1 fonts (file extensions .afm and .pfb) anymore. Most users should not be affected by this, as current fonts are available either in the format TrueType (.ttf) or OpenType (.otf) formats.

If you are affected by this, convert Type-1 fonts to a supported format, such as TrueType and then use the converted fonts. Conversion is possible with the application FontForge (package fontforge) which is included in openSUSE. For information on scripting such conversions, see https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/documentation/scripting/.