openSUSE Welcome Receiving Makeover

The familiar openSUSE-welcome window that greets millions of desktops is nearing retirement and a new approach will soon take its place.

Rather than re-inventing the wheel, members of openSUSE’s release team have decided to tweak and refine existing solutions like gnome-tour for GNOME and plasma-welcome for KDE’s Plasma by making a new controller and opensuse-welcome-launcher to coordinate them and provide desktop-specific content.

This new welcome-launcher manages which greeter to run depending on the desktop environment. This gives openSUSE’s release team more control over when and how welcome screens are shown, instead of relying on each greeter’s own autostart mechanism.

The launcher isn’t limited to the first boot. It can display greeters after major system updates so users learn about new features, enhancements, and changes in a timely way.

The enrollment of this new greeter will be done in multiple phases.

1) The launcher will initially call the well known legacy openSUSE-welcome. The only difference is that it loses the checkbox show on next boot, as it’s no longer in charge of autostart.

2) The launcher triggers openSUSE branded gnome-tour and plasma-welcome while keeping openSUSE-welcome as a fallback (in case it’s installed).

3) The legacy Qt5-based greeter will eventually be decommissioned. We should have an agreed fallback on desktop sessions without dedicated greeter.

The phased approach allows integration with openQA testing and provides flexibility for future improvements.

Since opensuse-welcome-launcher is considered a legacy and is one of the last Qt5-dependent applications, the move will help phase out some remaining Qt5 components across the distribution.