From System Admin to Game Dev: Cockpit as the Ultimate Canvas for Custom Linux Tooling

The Modern Face of Linux Management

In the world of SUSE, we often talk about “Zero-Touch” and “Infrastructure-as-Code.” But behind every automated cluster is a human who occasionally needs to see exactly what is happening on a specific node, or make adjustments. This is about pets, not cattle.

For many of our customers – especially those embracing SUSE Linux Enterprise – that “human interface” is Cockpit. It was introduced with SUSE Linux Micro and now is part of all SUSE Linux Enterprise 16; of course you’ll find it in openSUSE Leap 16 and Tumbleweed as well. It’s lightweight, browser-based, and built on the philosophy of being “zero-footprint.” But Cockpit is more than just a dashboard for logs and configuration; it is a modular platform designed to be extended.

Beyond the Standard Dashboard

While SUSE delivers the foundation and has extended the upstream project, every business has unique technical needs. Perhaps you need a custom view for a proprietary hardware sensor, or a simplified “big green button” for a non-technical operator to restart a specific microservice.

To test just how low the “entry level” is for creating these customizations, I set myself a challenge. As a Team Leader, I don’t spend much time in the IDE. So, I asked: Can I build a fully functional, custom Cockpit application in just a few hours using AI-assisted coding?

The “Minesweeper” Experiment

I decided to build a classic Minesweeper. Why a game? Because it requires a UI, logic, and state management – the same building blocks you’d use to create a custom business dashboard. Last but not least it makes the QA fun. Using an AI coding assistant and the Cockpit “Starter Kit,” the process was eye-opening:

• The Idea: I thought about what the desired outcome should be. I tried to explain as detailed as possible but practically found it needs a few follow ups and refinement to give it direction when you see the first results. I didn’t preserve the prompts, unfortunately.
• The UI: I used HTML/JavaScript, React, Patternfly, everything that comes with the Starter Kit; I cloned this before starting the agent and instructed it to follow the given standards. Cockpit doesn’t force a heavy framework on you; if it runs in a browser, it can run in Cockpit so you could start from scratch. But if you want the look and feel and things such as Dark Mode then go with the standards.
• The Integration: Within a few hours, I had a functional and appealing game living in between Kernel Dump and Package Management. Yay! It could have been faster but I was watching the development activities closely and confirmed every single tool/command run by the agent.
• Packaging: SUSE’s Open Build Service is free and easy to use by people anyway, I however also delegated this to the coding agent so I finally got a standard RPM package which integrates with the system and allows long term maintainability.

If you’re interested to see the code or explore it further, here you go: 

• Starter Kit repo: https://github.com/cockpit-project/starter-kit 
• Code repo: https://github.com/rsimai/cockpit-minesweeper 
• OBS home project: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:rsimai/cockpit-minesweeper 

Note from the Engineering Desk

While I’m proud of my high score, let’s be clear: SUSE does not recommend installing Minesweeper on your production servers. We also don’t recommend managers do the coding, at least not without proper reviews by people with the right engineering skills. This experiment was about demonstrating that the barrier to entry for customizing your SUSE Linux Enterprise environment is now effectively zero. For reference, I used Copilot in VS Code along with the model GPT-5.3-codex and no particular additional AGENTS input.

Why This Matters for Your Business

The ability to quickly “webify” a command-line tool or a business process means:

• Reduced Training Time: Build interfaces that speak the language of your specific industry.
• Rapid Prototyping: Go from a “napkin idea” for a management tool to a working Cockpit plugin in a single afternoon.
• Empowered Teams: Remember to always review code that is put into production but you don’t need a dedicated web development department to improve your sysadmin workflow. 

Your Choice, Your Interface

At SUSE, we believe in Choice. That extends to how you interact with your systems. Cockpit provides the foundation, but your technical and business needs provide the blueprint. Whether you’re managing edge devices at scale or a single mission-critical server, the power to customize is already in your hands.

What will you build to make your team’s life easier? Something more productive than Minesweeper?