OpenSuse is such a mystery to me. In Debian, I know it’s community run and there’s a thousand developers all over the world and they vote and discuss everything. Ubuntu is corporate and that’s easy to understand too. But OpenSuse? They say it’s a community distro, but my (uneducated) feeling is that the community is like four Suse employees. Is there actually a community of developers? What is OpenSuse? If someone knows I’d like to know what it’s like from the inside.
Here’s a page from OpenSuse’s website that links to some really interesting interviews with people who contribute to the project:
https://people.opensuse.org/index.html
Quote from interview with Ludwig:
Q: Three words to describe openSUSE? Or make up a proper slogan! A: Lots of fun!
Q: What do you think the future holds for openSUSE? A: The future is unwritten. As long as we have brilliant people we will see new ideas we haven’t thought about before.
Q: If you would have unlimited resources, what would you do with it? A: What kind of resources?
Q: Let’s say you have money to hire a thousand people to work on openSUSE. Who would you hire and what would you let them do? A: Finally fix RPM, printing and KDE? :-)
Q: Star Trek or Star Wars? A: Star Trek.
Q: Torvalds or Stallman? A: Pfft.
Interesting, thank you. I started reading through and realized there are no newer interviews than 8 years ago. And two of the three most recent interviews are of Suse employees. This kind of reinforces my feeling to be honest.
I noticed the age of the interviews after replying - kinda sad, reminded me of forums I joined around that time, and have since dried up as technology evolved. I actually ran opensuse for awhile around that time too (it was not very polished) - shame I didn’t know about the interviews then.
Nowadays I run a Fedora-based distro called Ultramarine - which rocks! Fast, smooth, stable, versatile. Small but knowledgeable and very friendly Discord-based support. Sponsored by a small startup called Fyra Labs. I thoroughly recommend checking them out.
