08.02.10
Jos Poortvliet Joins Novell as Staff
Summary: Novell hires one of KDE’s marketing public faces
OPENSUSE plays a special role in KDE4. It’s not only that the KDE4 Live CDs tend to be derived from OpenSUSE; it’s also that S.u.S.E. has a long KDE tradition (so does Mandrake/Mandriva). Based on this new post, Poortvliet’s appointment as OpenSUSE Community Manager is a job. He comes from a KDE background. Previously, we were not sure if it was a voluntary role or a paid role like Zonker’s; either way, now we know.
Now I might have this nice ‘community manager’ title, but as I said before, please note that that’s just a Novell title.
For KDE4, OpenSUSE is probably not the best distribution. Here is somewhat of a new rant about it; for a solid KDE4-based distribution, it’s worth looking at Fedora, Mandriva, and PCLinuxOS, to name some of the better-known candidates. It’s unfortunate that OpenSUSE is still Novell’s property. █