Summary: Bumps on the road for the only Microsoft-'approved' distribution of GNU/Linux

IT HAS BEEN a long time since SLE* was last released. RHEL has a lot more releases and a lot more demand. A couple of years ago OpenSUSE reduced the frequency of releases and already we see retractions (as covered some days ago) and delays, according to the following summary which says:

In fact, Systemd is being removed from Tumbleweed as well. Greg K.H. said, "Due to a number of inter dependencies on packages that are not ready for Tumbleweed, and other interactions with the system that are causing problems for some users, I'm going to remove systemd from Tumbleweed today to allow the developers to spend more time on getting it stable for Factory and 12.1 instead of having to chase down problems that are specific to Tumbleweed only."

Other issues are still up in the air as well:

- there are still 22 build failures in openSUSE:Factory:Staging:DtNeeded - 11.4 artwork needs to go - several kmps do not build: ndiswrapper, omnibook, vmpware-guest, xen, xtables-addons

Stephan Kulow summed it up by saying, "All in all I see no beta this week and next week SUSE has hackweek blackout ;(" It is believed the delay will not affect the final release date.

If the project continues to shrink, then more such delays will be expected. Several Microsoft-'approved' (and Microsoft taxed) distributions have already died, leaving just SUSE.

To be fair to OpenSUSE, there are some non-Novell/Attachmate people in there, as demonstrated for example by those photos Andreas Jaeger mentions and the many assorted posts about the OpenSUSE Conference [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. Hackweek is coming too [1, 2]

"To never depend on SUSE is a good thing."The problem with OpenSUSE it that it is still owned or controlled by Microsoft, by proxy. The promotion of Mono software often comes through OpenSUSE (the first to adopt a lot of it) and SUSE even has a special relationship with Xamarin, which promotes proprietary derivatives of Mono (core).

According to this new post, "recently we had a huge discussions at the conference about how openSUSE was faring in India and it seemed that India was not faring well. "

Actually, India is faring well; it's SUSE that's not faring well. To never depend on SUSE is a good thing. ⬆