Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 15th Jun 2008 21:11 UTC
SuSE, openSUSE "Of all the community distributions, probably the least known is openSUSE. After two and a half years, the distro is not only still working out details about how its community operates - including how its governing board is elected - but also struggling to come out of the shadow of its corporate parent Novell, much as Fedora has emerged from its initial dominance by Red Hat. With the pending release of openSUSE 11.0, community manager Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier suggests that the distribution is finally starting to get the recognition it deserves. In the middle of preparations for the new release, Brockmeier took the time to talk with Linux.com about the priorities within the community and its relation with the larger world of free software."
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speedy recovery
by dwave on Mon 16th Jun 2008 13:51 UTC
dwave
Member since:
2006-09-19

Novell did a lot to piss of the Suse crowd, including firing key personalities after taking over Suse in 2003. And while I think that layoffs and deep cuts were necessary it is also obvious that it was going downhill for the OpenSuse 'Community'. Also their press staff totally sucked at times. Talked with Novel/OpenSuse reps who didn't have basic knowledge about their product ("uh, yes - we have a product like that?!').
So it's good to see that Novell/OpenSuse tries to breathe new life into their distro. Hopefully they will make the necessary changes quick enough to survive in a niche market. OpenSuse 11-RC looks promising. Now they only need to make the transition from old Suse cruft* like YAST and SuseConfig to a sane Linux OS and they could get back in the game.

*I know, Yast and SuseConfig is great for first time desktop users. But apart from that it is not practicable since it strays too far from de-facto standard Linux environments.