Hello :)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.
Yeah ill be switching off of Fedora onto OpenSUSE as ive heard good things and Fedora is headed by Redhat, which is headed by IBM. I liked Fedora but its not anythung im super attached to so looking forward to learning OpenSUSE.
IMHO any Linux distribution will be a good change from Windows and Mac if you are trying to divest from US products.
Even if they are not european, they are open source.
Love openSUSE! Been using tumbleweed with gnome for quite a bit and it’s probably the best experience I have had with an operating system so far!
Tried Arch, Debian flavors, Nix, Fedora, and many of the other popular distros and they are all pretty darn good but the lizard Linux takes the cake for me! Highly recommend!
Linux Mint is technically an Irish based distro, as well.
I love opensuse if nothing else for the great mascot and the very talented artists who do their wallpapers, logos, and splashes. Also their open source font is what I daily drive on my machines! It is very nice!
Sadly they have a small team I think compared to other major distros. Their microOS team I think is just 2 or 3 people.
I have both Kalpa and bazzite and for me, bazzite just works better in almost every case and their encryption scheme and rollback method fits my needs better. But Kalpa is very usable if you don’t game. Otherwise some hours of work getting steam flatpak working correctly.
I just installed OpenSUSE on both my work and personal machines, having been on Kubuntu for many years prior to that. I love it so far!
Kubuntu is also kind of European, because KDE e.V. is from Germany.
KDE Neon would probably a closer fit, as it’s entirely maintained by KDE e.V., whereas Kubuntu still relies on Canonical
