The Blog of Bob Rubbens
The 27th of May I got a new work laptop. My personal + work laptop (a Lenovo P1 Gen 3) is great, but a bit of a brick to carry around. I asked the hardware guys of my groups if there happened to be a smaller laptop lying around unused, to avoid ordering a brand new one. With the typical employee churn going on in research groups, I was hoping to get lucky. And I did!
It’s a run-of-the-mill HP EliteBook. It has 8 gigs of ram, which is a bit on the low side for the more compute-heavy tasks I do from time to time. However, in the two areas I was hoping for improvement, it absolutely smashes: battery life (I can easily work for 2+ hours on the train and use less than half the battery), weight and volume (haven’t measured, but both far less than my personal laptop).
With my previous OpenSUSE experiment already being over half a year ago, it was time for another try. I went ahead and installed OpenSUSE Leap on it, with the motivation that, for my work laptop, the OS needs to be as stable as possible.
General takeaway: very positive! I’ll be using OpenSUSE Leap for the foreseeable future on this laptop, and will install it on any future laptops I need to work on. Here are my experiences so far.
Power management is really nice. I’ve had a good time
switching the laptop from power save, to balanced, to let’s
goooo performance, depending on the situation (office
vs. traveling). It makes a noticeable difference in how long the battery
runs.
Display management is really nice. OpenSUSE Leap seems to have the spidey-sense of “doing the right thing” that I experienced when I was still using Windows back in the day (over 12 years ago now!). It has also passed the low bar of “not hanging when I plug and unplug displays at random moments”, which is actually an enormous achievement! Though I have to add, it does not surprise me that the first laptop I see pass this bar doesn’t have an Nvidia chip.
Packages are missing more often than I’m used to, but I can work around it. Typically there’s an experimental package available on https://software.opensuse.org with a little bit of fiddling, and in the leftover cases there is usually an AppImage binary or Flathub package available that works well enough.
The general UI experience is a lot better than I was expecting. When I first tried Slowroll and Tumbleweed, I mistakenly assumed the clunky UI was the default for OpenSUSE. The opposite is true: all standard applications (Okular, Firefox, system settings, etc.) are well integrated and skinned consistently. Clicking through the windows and dialogs is also snappy.
Problems seem get resolved pretty quickly. I’ve had two significant problems; luckily they weren’t blockers for using the laptop in general. These were an update getting stuck because of some dependency being broken, and the laptop sometimes not shutting down properly. Both were fixed in some time, without any effort on my part. Thanks, OpenSUSE community!
Sleep seems to be temperamental every once in a while. It’s rare, but sometimes it happens that I close my laptop to move to another office, only for it not to wake up properly when I open the laptop again later. I can count the number of times this has happened on one hand, though I have to admit lately I’ve been avoiding the sleep feature, so it’s not a representative statistic. The fact that it’s so unpredictable also makes it difficult to debug and report. I’m considering asking the community for tips on any logging I can set up so I can perhaps debug this phenomenon offline. I’ve had pleasant experiences with them so far, and I have no doubt there’s some progress to be made there. The fact that this problem is so intermittent and happens so little makes it a difficult call.
System configuration is GUI heavy. In other words, I’m not
very confident I can change a configuration file via the terminal. Let
alone finding out which file I’d even need to consider, the
man pages certainly don’t mention the relevant files. While
I see the value in this (it’s pretty rare the system settings go out of
sync with what I see on the screen, which I’m guessing the GUI barrier
helps with. This is great!), it also makes it difficult to share
settings between laptops. I have to admit I have only investigated
storing some settings in configuration files for Dolphin and Kate, so
there might still be a clean way to achieve this. Perhaps
KDE/Plasma/OpenSUSE has a general abstraction for this that I can lean
on?
HDMI output sometimes gets artifacty. Things like, the desktop background disappearing for 50%, lines in Isabelle’s JEdit starting to glow unreadably green and flickering, fat black and white dashes hiding text in Obsidian and Thunderbird. Once these artifacts start appearing, it can take between 10 minutes and 3 hours before the application becomes unusable, so I can always save my work and cleanly restart the laptop if restarting the application doesn’t fix it. But it’s still quite annoying, especially if happens a bunch of times in a row, easily wasting 20 minutes of concentration.
There’s some low-hanging fruit with regards to fixing or improving the situation that I haven’t picked yet. I remember logging out and in made the problems go away a while ago, which should cut down the cycle time quite a bit. I also haven’t really experimented yet with older kernels, or explored how exactly the Intel GPU drivers are integrated and configured in OpenSUSE. Here, too, I can still check with the community for ideas on setting up logging that can help me after the problem has manifested.
I’m also not ruling out a hardware problem, which obviously OpenSUSE can’t help me with. This laptop is already a bit older, and I’m not the first owner, so it could even be a wear-and-tear hardware deficiency.
Full disclosure: it’s been a while since I last saw the artifacty behaviour. Maybe I got lucky again?
I’m pretty happy with my setup at the moment. OpenSUSE is snappy, I’m getting the hang of the packaging system, and it works great on my small portable laptop. Also some aspects I was expecting to be annoyed with in the past, e.g. the “bloated” feeling of the UIs of apps such as Dolphin or Kate, have gone away entirely after tweaking them a bit and using them full-time for a few months. The bad and ugly parts discussed above are not ideal, but also not unbearable. And if I do manage to clear some time for these problems, I’m confident I could make some progress on the problems with some tips of the friendly community.
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