Welcome greeters are something every Linux fan has run into—those little windows that pop up right after you install a distro or upgrade to a new version of a desktop environment like GNOME or KDE.
Their main job is pretty simple: give you a quick tour of what’s new and offer some handy links to post-install tools. How useful they really are, though, depends on who you ask. Personally, I find them a bit of an annoying “feature,” but plenty of folks probably appreciate having them around. Anyway.
One of the more recognizable ones—the friendly “Ahoy, this is openSUSE” window that greets users of this cute green chameleon—is now getting ready for a big change.
The distribution’s release team has started phasing it out in favor of a new system, opensuse-welcome-launcher, which will coordinate GNOME Tour and Plasma Welcome while providing a smoother, more flexible rollout experience.
The team’s approach is simple – to build on upstream solutions. The new launcher will decide which greeter to run based on the desktop session, giving developers more direct control over timing and behavior instead of depending on each greeter’s autostart mechanism.
The transition is being done in steps. At first, the launcher will continue calling the legacy openSUSE Welcome, but the “show on next boot” option is gone since autostart is no longer its responsibility.
The second phase will trigger openSUSE-branded versions of GNOME Tour and Plasma Welcome, with the old greeter left as a fallback. In the final stage, the Qt5-based welcome tool will be decommissioned completely once there’s consensus on a fallback for desktops without a dedicated greeter.
Last but not least, according to devs, the change helps the distribution shed one more legacy Qt5 dependency—openSUSE Welcome was among the last Qt5 holdouts in the stack.
For more information, see the announcement.
Image credits: openSUSE
