I dread upgrading OpenSuSE to a new version

This time is no different. Ugh.

It always breaks so much stuff.

I don’t understand why it’s so hard to keep the list of Image Magick delegates from one version to the next.

I don’t understand why it’s so hard to find how to add the delegates that were removed during the upgrade.

Today, I need to convert a PDF to a PNG and convert -version tells me I have support for

  • bzlib
  • lzma
  • x
  • xml
  • zlib

none of which are image related.

Of course, this work I need to do is time-sensitive, and instead of being able to get events published to the web site for this coming weekend, I’m having debug why Image Magick is broken again.

I’m an hour in, and it’s still broken, and there’s zero information on how to fix the problem. One person said “just install from xxxx and it just works” – no, it doesn’t.

It shouldn’t take an more than an hour to convert one file from PDF to PNG.

Sometimes I hate being on OpenSuSE.

To be fair, SuSE was always more geared to be a server operating system, on which one could install a desktop environment. And with server environments, one needs to be a little more careful than with a desktop environment. If I break something on a desktop: one person (me) is affected. If I break something on a server: a thousand people are affected. So SuSE doesn’t tend to rush to implement the latest / newest thing. It also imposes defaults that are more secure (less permissive) than you might find on something else.

But apparently during the upgrade, something was reset to not allow me to execute magick filename.pdf filename.png and I’m having a damned time figuring out how to fix that. There doesn’t seem to be a README file anywhere that explains it.

I assumed that when I went into YaST and added ImageMagick and Ghostscript that things would work. You know what you get when you assume, correct?

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