I have never understood why these things aren’t removable by default. Especially when it’s something that some users will literally never interact with, not even a single time. Why not make everything optional? I don’t get it.

I removed this button with userchrome.css on day 1, but … I really shouldn’t have to.

Thanks for sharing.

As a somewhat related thing that others might find useful, here are my shortcuts to get my Varmilo keyboard media keys working with useful functions instead of the default stuff. I’ve got these set up as custom shortcuts in KDE, but they should work in any context:

Next track

dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Next

Previous track

dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Previous

Play-pause toggle

dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.PlayPause

You can replace Spotify in the destination parameter with any MPRIS-capable program. To find out what’s available on the dbus and get the exact name, use this command:

dbus-send --session --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus --type=method_call --print-reply /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames

If you ever wonder why the people you know seem to be better friends with each other than with you, or why they look away while talking with you, or why they always seems to excuse themselves after interacting with you for only a very short time, this post is why.

That’s exactly why I am on Tumbleweed as well.

I am not German myself, but most of my colleagues are. Having gotten to know the German attitude towards technology, I feel I understand why life with openSUSE is as uneventful as it is. How anyone got them to adopt something as subversively radical as a rolling release model is something of a mystery to me, but I won’t complain.

Thanks for this clarification. I didn’t consider that someone might run btrfs without snapshots, but I suppose that might even be quite common. I don’t get out much.

There are a bunch of software-related reasons why openSUSE is a good choice (snapper, zypper, yast, to name a few), although few are exclusive to openSUSE. I think the primary selling point of openSUSE (Tumbleweed) is that it is a rolling release distro that never crashes, never requires attention, and just works. One of the reasons people don’t talk about it is probably that it is boring. All packages are tested extensively. It never breaks. And even if it did break, the default btrfs file system and snapper ensure that the system doesn’t stay broken for longer than it takes to reboot.

If you want a distro that is up to date, easy to use, and dependable, openSUSE is a fantastic choice. It’s just not very exciting to have something that never requires attention; a lot of people use Linux because they like things requiring attention.

As an afterthought, I also think the fact that openSUSE and its users seem to be pathologically unable to create any logo or symbol for anything even tangentially related to the distribution that doesn’t look like absolute shit might be holding them back.