1.0 Introduction
Suse-based distros are a little bit tricky: SLES is the Suse Linux Enterprise Server and is a commercial, server-grade, heavy duty distro. The community release of that same software is called OpenSuse Leap. The 'preview' code that will eventually become OpenSuse Leap (and hence SLES) is available in the form of OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Think of Tumbleweed as a rolling distribution that's ever so slightly unstable; Leap is a rather more stable version of that; and SLES is the final, commercial-grade release of that stabilised code.
Since SLES costs money and I'm too cheap to part with any, Niente has not been tested on SLES, but it has been tested to run perfectly fine on both Leap and Tumbleweed -so you might reasonably expect it to cope with SLES, too: I just can't tell you it does or not, because I literally don't have the relevant software to test on.
For this article, I'm using Leap 15.6 with a KDE-based desktop environment, but Niente doesn't particularly care what desktop environment you use, so the instructions will work fine with the likes of Gnome, XFCE or LXQt, too.
As with all these installation articles, I assume a fresh, default installation of the underlying operating system. I always assume, however, that any installer-provided options to install third-party programs, drivers or audio codec support are taken: not that it makes any difference to the way Niente works, but I just like to be clear on what my working assumptions are 🙂