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Comment by bjoli | Hacker News Reader

I moved from Ubuntu to OpenSUSE tumbleweed recently and I must say it is lovely. The OS is still the Linux I learned when running slackware (with some modern extras that I have learned to live with) while still giving me most of the polish of Ubuntu.

Some things were of course strange. Having to type the disk encryption password twice being standard behaviour is pretty strange, and not getting to set the keyboard layout properly on install is always a bummer (I use Swedish Dvorak). Ubuntu is the only distro so far that gets this right in the installer.

It was an easy fix in SUSE though.

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I believe that the disk encryption twice thing is to prevent the so called "evil maid" attack. Where both the boot partition, and the file system are separately encrypted. Frustratingly, the encryption in GRUB2 is painfully slow, so I normally disable that. You can do this by creating the boot partition separately from the root file system, and only encryption the OS filesystem. The downside is that if someone steals your drive, or clones it, they can hammer away at the encrypted filesystem. Not really in my threat model, so I normally go with unencrypted boot + encrypted filesystem. The kernel decryption is much faster as well.

Details here in case I have some of that wrong: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Encrypted_root_file_system#Avoid...

I did install OpenSUSE and immediately removed it after I encountered the same problem.

It's not normal to have to enter the exact same password twice. I don't care if it's about the "evil maid" attack or whatever.

Linux developers would have us open our fridges by first flipping them upside down and explain with a straight face it's perfectly normal and is meant to address <this or that issue>.

>I did install OpenSUSE and immediately removed it after I encountered the same problem.

If you uninstalled it immediately because you don't like the defaults, I suspect Linux might be an operating system you wish to avoid entirely.

It's possbile to setup a keyfile in your boot partition to decrypt your root partition so you only have to enter a password once. But this really shouldn't be necessary.

I switched to OpenSUSE after an year with Fedora and ~14 years on Ubuntu. The installer had me scratching my head. After my first attempt I too ended up having to enter the decryption key twice. The installer definitely could do with polish. Ubuntu's installer still remains the gold standard in terms of ease of use.

After reinstallation with the correct configuration though, it was smooth sailing. The only other change I had to make was disabling KWallet so that it connects to WiFi without prompting me for a decryption key.

It’s a complete mystery to me why they didn’t implement allowing the keyboard to state its layout when they transitioned to USB.

Personally I find Fedora's installer to be less intuitive than OpenSUSE. OpenSUSE is wizard style, while Fedora is just a page with all the options where click on the stuff you care about changing, some of which has sensible defaults and some of which is mandatory to visit. It's probably a lot more efficient once you're used to it, but it felt unintuitive the first time I used it.

I don't remember the details but I don't think I had any trouble with Fedora's installer. But I spent way to much time trying to figure out how to modify the guided partition scheme that OpenSUSE picked.

I switched about 8 months ago, and also made the switch to KDE around the same time. I'm running it on everything I own now, apart from my phone and a Raspberry Pi. I love it. Having snapper installed and enabled by default has saved my bacon twice. Most recently I did a `zypper dup --no-recommends` and my ASUS Zenbook S OLED suddenly refused to operate at any resolution other than max (amd driver / kernel update?) so I rolled back and everything worked. That's extremely convenient, especially on a work machine where you can't afford to be wasting half a day fixing shit.

IIRC you can set the keyboard layout right at the start of the install. It should be on the same page as the license agreement.

I can set swedish, but not Swedish Dvorak.

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