openSUSE

The project is self-organized without a legal structure, although the establishment of a Foundation has been under consideration for some time.[19]

SUSE as the main sponsor exerts some influence, but the project is legally independent of SUSE. openSUSE is a "do-ocracy" in which those, who do the work, also decide what happens (those who decide). This primarily refers to desktop and application development, as the sources of the base packages have been coming from SLE since the switch to the Leap development model. To further unify the base, the 'Closing-the-Leap-Gap' project has been started,[20] where openSUSE Leap 15.3 will be completely based on SLE's binary packages.

There are three main organizational units:

• openSUSE Board: the board consists of 5 members elected for 2 years at a time, plus the chairman, who is provided by SUSE.[21] The Board serves as a central point of contact, helps with conflict resolutions, communicates community interests to SUSE, etc. As of January 2021, the Board has the following members:
  • Dr. Axel Braun (DE)
  • Neal Gompa (US)
  • Simon Lees (AU)
  • Gertjan Lettink (NL)
  • Dr. Gerald Pfeifer (AT), Chairman
  • Vinzenz Vietke (DE)
• Election Officials: The Election Committee manages and supervises the elections to the openSUSE Board. It consists of three or more volunteers.[22]
• Membership-Officials: The Membership-Officials[23] are appointed by the Board if interested. The Membership-Officials decide on the admission of contributors to the group of openSUSE members upon request. A member receives, among other things, an @opensuse.org address. Only members may vote in the election to the Board.

Logo openSUSE Tumbleweed

Tumbleweed is the flagship of the openSUSE Project. A stable and tested Rolling Release, which receives new software each day, and which is basically unbreakable: if a fault occurs as a result of system updates, a snapshot function allows users to revert to a previous system state. Tumbleweed is preferred by openSUSE users as a desktop system.[31]

In the old development model, with each new openSUSE release (13.0, 13.1,...) a new rolling release was set-up, which always received new packages. When the new release was at the doorstep, and Tumbleweed was reset to that release, most packages were newer than the ones in the release, which led to problems.

With the switch to Leap the development model was changed completely: according to the Factory First policy all software packages had to be sent to Factory in the first place, before they could be included in a distribution. Out of Factory a daily snapshot is taken and tested in openQA. A successful test is released as the next Tumbleweed snapshot. Unlike other rolling release distributions, Tumbleweed is a tested rolling release, which increases stability dramatically.

Technically Tumbleweed is the basis for MicroOS and Kubic.

Logo von openSUSE Leap

Leap is a classic stable distribution approach, one release each year and in between security and bugfixes. This makes Leap very attractive as server operating system,[32] but as well for Desktops[33] where the family admin has only little effort with. Online release upgrades are mostly so unspectacular and trouble-free that the community already proposed, the next release should be called 'boring'

For the version released in the fall of 2015, the development team settled on the name openSUSE Leap with the deviating version number 42.1. As in the openSUSE version 4.2 from May 1996, which was called S.u.S.E. Linux at the time, the number 42 refers to the question about "life, the universe and everything" in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book series. After that, the basis packages are received from the SUSE Linux Enterprise, while applications and desktops come from Tumbleweed.

At the openSUSE conference held in Nuremberg in 2016, statistics were announced that since the conceptual reorientation with openSUSE Leap 42.1, increasing user numbers had been recorded.[34] According to this, the number of downloads is 400,000 DVD-images per month with an increasing tendency. Each month, 1,600 installations would be added, and 500,000 packages would be installed. The number of Tumbleweed users is 60,000, half of whom frequently perform updates. Thus, the number of Tumbleweed installations had doubled in the last year.

Other findings from the statistics are that most installations are done via DVD images. The dominant architecture is x64. The geographical distribution of users has hardly changed according to these figures. One third of users are from Germany, 12% are found in the USA, 5% in Russia and 3% in Brazil.[34]

MicroOS[35] is a minimalistic, self-maintained and transactional system, which is primarily, but not exclusively, intended for use in edge computing or as container runtime. Some even use it as desktop system.[36]

Basically all software available for Tumbleweed is also available for MicroOS. As it comes with podman Container-Runtime, MicroOS is the perfect Container-Host.

Kubic-Logo

Kubic is a Container-as-a-Service Platform,[37] based on MicroOS. It comes with Kubernetes and is designed for large container environments. The openSUSE Community maintains a number of containers in their registry[38] The configuration was originally done with Salt,[39] but later it was switched to Kubeadm. Kubic shares the codebase with Tumbleweed and MicroOS and thus allows transactional updates[40]

SUSE includes an installation and administration program called YaST ("Yet another Setup Tool") which handles hard disk partitioning, system setup, RPM package management, online updates, network and firewall configuration, user administration and more in an integrated interface. In more recent times, many more YaST modules have been added, including one for Bluetooth support. It also controls all software applications. SaX2 was once integrated into YaST to change monitor settings, however with openSUSE 11.3 SaX2 has been removed.

The GTK user interface was removed starting with Leap 42.1, however the ncurses and Qt interfaces remain.

AutoYaST is part of YaST2 and is used for automatic installation. The configuration is stored in an XML file and the installation happens without user interaction.

WebYaST

WebYaST is a web interface version of YaST. It can configure settings and updates of the openSUSE machine it is running on. It can also shutdown and check the status of the host.

ZYpp (or libzypp) is a Linux software management engine. ZYpp is the backend for zypper, the default command line package management tool for openSUSE.

The Open Build Service provides software developers with a tool to compile, release and publish their software for many distributions, including Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian. It typically simplifies the packaging process, so developers can more easily package a single program for many distributions, and many openSUSE releases, making more packages available to users regardless of what distribution version they use. It is published under the GNU GPLv2+.[41]

By default, OpenSUSE uses Delta RPMs when updating an installation. A Delta RPM contains the difference between an old and new version of a package. This means that only the changes between the installed package and the new one, are downloaded. This reduces bandwidth consumption and update time, which is especially important on slow Internet connections.

SUSE was a leading contributor to the KDE project for many years. SUSE's contributions in this area have been very wide-ranging, and affecting many parts of KDE such as kdelibs and KDEBase, Kontact, and kdenetwork. Other notable projects include: KNetworkManager – a front-end to NetworkManager[42] and Kickoff – a new K menu for KDE Plasma Desktop.[43]

From openSUSE Leap 42.1 to 15.0, the default Plasma 5 desktop for openSUSE used the traditional cascading Application Menu in place of the upstream default Kickoff-like Application Launcher menu. The openSUSE Leap KDE experience is built on long term support versions of KDE Plasma, starting with openSUSE Leap 42.2.[44] With openSUSE Leap 15.1, the Plasma 5 desktop now again defaults to the Kickoff-style application menu.

The Ximian group became part of Novell, and in turn made and continued several contributions to GNOME with applications such as F-Spot, Evolution and Banshee. The GNOME desktop used the slab instead of the classic double-panelled GNOME menu bars from openSUSE 10.2 to openSUSE 11.4. In openSUSE 12.1 slab was replaced with the upstream GNOME Shell and GNOME Fallback designs.

GNOME 3.26 under openSUSE 15.1. openSUSE Leap's GNOME implementation has used Wayland by default since version 15.0.

Starting with openSUSE Leap 15.0, GNOME on Wayland is offered as the default GNOME session.[45] GNOME Classic, GNOME on Xorg, and "GNOME SLE" are offered as alternative sessions to the more upstream Wayland-based session.