SUSE: openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clown Computing, and Path To Rancher Desktop 1.0.0

I have been enjoying running openSUSE Tumbleweed on the Raspberry Pi 400 (and 4, I kind of mean the same thing, I just happen to appreciate the fun of the keyboard with containing the computer of the 400). The point of this blathering is to use the Raspberry Pi 400 in the same way as you would with Raspberry Pi OS but using openSUSE Tumbleweed with the Plasma desktop environment. This is not meant to disparage Raspberry Pi OS or any of the work they have continued to pour into the LXDE project but rather to give an alternative with all the fun tooling that openSUSE has to offer.

I have been putting together, bit-by-bit, a collection of things to make my Raspberry Pi life on openSUSE (and other things) more convenient. The link below is to a link into the openSUSE Wiki to download and image the SD Card with your choice of Leap or Tumbleweed with your preferred desktop. There are also links to the various applications to give your Pi 4/400 software feature parity with the bundled Raspberry Pi OS but on an openSUSE base.

Way back when in 2015 I wrote about differences between BYOS and on-demand images in “On Demand, BYOS, say what? Why do I need it?” mentioning that on-demand images contain “special sauce” that register an on-demand instance automatically to the SUSE operated update infrastructure in AWS EC2, Azure, and GCE. Much has changed since then, and with a project that we completed at the end of 2021 the “special sauce” is no longer just for on-demand images.

Rancher Desktop has been in development for just over a year with the open question, when do we have a 1.0.0 stable release? Along the way the scope has expanded, it was ported to run in more places, and the development team has grown. All of this happened as we worked out if Rancher Desktop would be useful for people, what features people want to use, and what are good ways to build it. We are finally ready to answer that 1.0.0 question.