Bonum Certa Men Certa

SUSE is Slowing Down

Turtle



Summary: OpenSUSE release cycle changed from 6 months to 8 months following layoffs

WITH the departure of some employees and concerns over the future, the OpenSUSE project will be run with less testers available. There are signs of trouble in fact, such as this horrifying experience caused by a bad update to OpenSUSE 11.1. It happened some days ago.

On Monday evening, just before calling it a night, I decided to attend to that little 'updates available my OpenSUSE 11.1 notebook. There were half a dozen updates, one of them being a kernel update, which doesn't happen too often. A few minutes later, I rebooted, and got nothing but a text login. Couldn't start X or even reconfigure it. Then I noticed that there was no networking, and only a small handful of modules loaded -- I looked at loaded modules to try to figure out why I wasn't getting networking, even via my wired Ethernet port. Something had gone wrong with the update, a process that normally causes me no grief at all.


SUSE will be slowing down a bit. It intends to pace its releases differently. But the project's leader is spinning this as the release cycle being "fixed", not longer. It's just a case of putting lipstick on a pig though. Ars Technica reports:

The new schedule was proposed in a message posted to the openSUSE mailing list by release manager Stephan Kulow. In the e-mail, he lists the months when releases are expected to arrive and also provides some insight into the feature plan for 11.2, the next major release.

"To give us something to plan around, we would like to propose a fixed release schedule. As a six-month release schedule is not something we consider feasible to maintain high-quality standards, we are proposing a fixed eight-month schedule," Kulow wrote.


OStatic, which writes favourably about Novell and OpenSUSE (well, Zonker writes there), also just echoed the story told by Novell.

Yesterday, the openSUSE Project announced that it will move to a fixed release schedule after November's release of openSUSE 11.2.


It was a similar storyline in Tectonic.

The OpenSuse development team has announced it will now follow a fixed release schedule, much like distributions such as Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu. In an emailed announcement yesterday, Stephan Kulow said that the community had decided to adopt an eight-month rotating cycle with the first release being OpenSuse 11.2 in November.


The real news here is not a "fixed" release cycle. The real news is that OpenSUSE will be re-released (version bump) once in 8 months rather than just 6.

Red Hat is looking to employ SUSE developers who were booted by Ron Hovsepian so that he can get bonuses for not-so-outstanding performance [1, 2, 3, 4]. Canonical might still be wooing them too, but we don't know this for sure.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Writing and Coding Isn't Always Enough
Last year we had to assume a role we didn't have before: litigants
Autumn Has Come
Autumn should be exciting in all sorts of ways; it'll also mark our anniversary
IBM Has Taken Control of GNOME
Don't expect a successor to be found any time soon
 
Links 01/09/2025: Fresh Backlash Against Slop and "Norway’s Electricity Crisis is About to Hit Britain"
Links for the day
Links 01/09/2025: Catching Up (Mostly via Deutsche Welle), "Windows TCO" Effect in UK
Links for the day
Gemini Links 01/09/2025: Linguistic Barriers and "Web 1.0 Hosting"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 31, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, August 31, 2025
The UEFI 9/11 - Part IV - External Interference
They all seem to be playing a role in crushing Software Freedom and self-determination for users
Links 31/08/2025: Baggage Claim Scams, an Insurrectionist’s War on Culture, and a Sudden Robotics Hype
Links for the day
Gemini Links 31/08/2025: Reviewing Netsurf and Slightly Less Historic Ada Design
Links for the day
Links 31/08/2025: Google Gmail Data Breach and LF Puff Pieces for Pay
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 30, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, August 30, 2025
This is What Google News Has Become
Moments ago
The Slopfarm WebProNews Has Turned Google News Into a Laughing Stock Full of Plagiarism by Slop
If Google News dies of neglect, that's one thing. It's starting to seem like active neglect by Google is a form of participation.
Do What is Moral, as What's Legal Isn't Always Moral
Do what's objectively moral, no matter the costs and the risks
Slopwatch: Google News Assisting Plagiarism and Anti-Linux FUD, Serial Slopper Rips Off Linux-Centric Journalists
This makes the Web a much worse place and lessens the incentive to do journalism
Links 30/08/2025: NVIDIA Fakes Results to Hide a Bubble Already in Implosion Phase, Data Breaches Galore, Important Win for Workers' Union in Canada
Links for the day
Representing and Speaking for Animals
If I ever choose to take this matter to tribunal with animals-centric NGOs on my side, it'll get some press coverage for sure
The UEFI 9/11 - Part II - Campaign of Censorship and Defamation Against Critics
In dictatorships, humour serves an important role. It's tragic.
In Kazakhstan, Yandex Estimated to be 20 Times Bigger Than Microsoft
Bing is measured as down this month
Shutterstock Not Enough? The Register MS Uses Slop Images in Articles (Seemingly More and More Over Time)
Cost-saving trajectory amid office shutdown?
Gemini Links 30/08/2025: Games, PostmarketOS, and Slop
Links for the day
Links 30/08/2025: Imgur Uproar and Many Ukraine Updates (Mediazona Reports Over 200,000 Russians Died for Putin)
Links for the day
How Not to Build Software
code forges that need a Web browser perhaps fill some 'niche' demand
GAFAM and "MATA"
The use of dark humour there hopefully helps illuminate what a lot of "modern" technology became like and how it interacts with human civilisation (to what ends and whose gain)
Birds Are Not "Pests and Vermin", Privacy is Not a Crime, and GNU/Linux is Not 'Hacking Platform'
I could not help but think of Free software analogies
The Sites Should Be Very Fast Again
That issue is now resolved
Flying in 2025
worse than ever before
Activists, Including Technical Activists, Need Not Pursue Affirmation
Techrights doesn't play or participate in a "popularity contest"
The UEFI 9/11 - Part III - Chaos is Scheduled to Happen Second Thursday of September (No Matter What the Microsofters Tell You)
The clock is ticking
Downplaying the Impact of "UEFI 9/11" is a Losing Strategy
we won't publish much whilst on holiday
Government Sites Should Run Free Software
Not proprietary bloatware with buzzwords
LLM Slopfarms Take No Breaks
When people run sites by bots they don't need to worry about "breaks"
GNOME Having a Meltdown Again
Thanks and farewell to Steven Deobald
Gemini Links 30/08/2025: Low Tech and Hunchbin 1.0.6
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 29, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, August 29, 2025