I have written about using PipeWire previously where I did have a very positive experience with it. Unfortunately, I did have some irritating quarks with it that ultimately resulted in my going back to using PulseAudio on my openSUSE Tumbleweed machines. They were little things needing to refresh the browser after a Bluetooth device changed status. I decided it was time to try PipeWire again when PulseAudio started to give me random Bluetooth audio device issues where the device, after connecting, would not become available.

I have heard about many of the improvements that had come to PipeWire and decided that now was the time to try it out again. I revisited the directions I had previously put together on the installation process and sure enough it worked. I did have to make one modification to it. I added a now new module called pipewire-aptx which is the Bluetooth aptX codec plugin.

If you have an installation of openSUSE Tumbleweed that is using the PulseAudio sound server, the command is quite simple to execute in the terminal to switch you over. I have tested and verified this on multiple machines with success.

• BCI test tutorial - openQA bites

  Base Container Images (BCI) are a SUSE offer for a variety of container images suitable for building custom applications atop of the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). They are a suitable building platform for different container applications and are available for free without subscription. In this blog post I’m covering how we test BCI before they are released and how you can run individual tests on them.

• An update from ALP Quality Engineering - openSUSE News

  Building our products in an open and transparent way allows us to rethink the way how we test.

  Jose Lausuch from our ALP Quality Engineering was invited to the Community Workgroup weekly meeting to speak about current plans of Quality Engineering for ALP.

  Jose mentioned that the QE Workgroup would like to start testing existing ALP images with the existing MicroOS test suite. The effort is coordinated in poo#112409.

• Higher Ed needs to step up to stay relevant as Open Source floods the IT world [Ed: So this is where Patrick Masson moved to after he quit OSI; Danese Cooper Cooper, who worked for famous criminal Bill Gates, is there too]

  Grant money is pouring in to support institutions of higher education that are taking a strong position in the adoption of Open Source technologies. 82% of enterprise IT leaders are choosing to work with Open Source vendors, and higher education is stepping up and following suit. In order to stay competitive, campuses must take a critical look at how they manage IT portfolios and seriously consider a larger commitment to their own Open Source strategy.

• Registration Currently Sold Out, We’re Trying to Add More Places – Linux Plumbers Conference 2022

  Back in 2021 when we were planning this conference, everyone warned us that we’d still be doing social distancing and that in-person conferences were likely not to be as popular as they had been, so we lowered our headcount to fit within a socially distanced venue. Unfortunately the enthusiasm of the plumbers community didn’t follow this conventional wisdom so the available registrations sold out within days of being released. We’re now investigating how we might expand the venue capacity to accommodate some of the demand for in-person registration, so stay tuned for what we find out.

• SUSECON 2022 highlights include container management, edge [Ed: SUSE is selling complexity instead of GNU/Linux. It's also a proprietary software reseller.]

  SUSE's annual global conference, SUSECON, held virtually in June, was jam-packed with initiatives and information essential for the future of SUSE and for the open source market.

The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.

As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company's annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.

The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.

The picture is complicated by the fact that there are two different openSUSE distributions: Leap and Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed is a rolling-release distro, akin to Arch Linux; there's no stable version, and new packages emerge from the project's Factory every day.

In contrast, Leap is one of the most stable distros available. Major releases appear approximately every few years, with a new minor or point release annually. Since the last point release, 15.3, the project has synchronized its codebase with the enterprise distro. This makes it possible to migrate an installation of openSUSE Leap to the paid SLE product and receive commercial support.