A Graveyard of Missed Opportunities
OpenSUSE, or at the time Suse, was my first Linux experience. It must have been around version 6.0 in 1999 and came in a box, with two books and 6 CD's.
Immersed at the time in Windows, Macintosh, graphics design and CAD programs we didn't know anything about Linux, but it made a lasting impression. The German engineering in computing, solid, well documented. Over the years I moved over to the corporate side, using Windows only, but I've always kept track of openSUSE.
So when I came back into Linux in 2018 (running your own business on a 4Gb Surface Pro and Windows wasn't that feasible...) I quickly re-discovered it.
Tumbleweed was excellent, their snapshots were a great safety-net and their cooperation with KDE made sure the latest 5.20 or 21 was almost immediately there. Later on they were the first with Gnome 47.0, tested and run through all QA processes.
The Golden Era that was also the Beginning of the End.
What was worrying was the unclear situation, with changing ownership, venture capital and technological focus, or lack of. But still, being a technology driven company there was a flurry of directions and products (MicroOS, Slowroll, Kalpa, Leap 16 or not).
But the gap between Suse and openSUSE widened. The FOSS side of things received some support, but Aeon and Kalpa (immutable MicroOS Gnome and KDE) are in beta and alpha respectively for the last 3 or 4 years now? Bugs (Plasma login on Kalpa) are unsolved, shares are up for sale again and the forums are not a place to hang out when you haven't got the knowledge. To be fair: unfortunately that goes for most forums these days.
Even the Gecko was replaced by some corporate circular logo, that has no relation whatsoever to the knowledgeable neckbeards we've come to love.
OpenSUSE still has quite a big userbase, but that's mainly in Germany these days. No one hears about it or uses it (desktop that is). The connection to KDE, afaik, has loosened quite significantly. Maintainers and powerusers are mainly developing for their own inner circle it seems. In there all is fine.
And the focus is on the cloud & container market. It is where the money is, who can blame Suse? I certainly won't.
So, it seems all these wonderful opensource initiatives are slowly fading away: technologically very good, but no-one knows about them or uses them.
Another epitaph is being added to that graveyard: when European digital sovereignty is on everyone's political agenda, no one talks about openSUSE.
France will start trialing with a hardened NixOS, where openSUSE has apparmor, secureboot, TPM and hardware support for many platforms ootb. The container technology is really good, and I'd take a Kalpa anytime over a self-constructed bootc image. Aeon is one of the best Gnome's out there, but who knows?
That lack of support from the corporate side is slowly, but certainly, killing off the geeky stuff. It's not like RedHat and Fedora and my uneducated guess is that desktop openSUSE will end up similar to the AlmaLinux desktop: a desktop package to support a server base. For that we want solid and boring.
In the meantime you'll hear me talking about something great from openSUSE every now and then. I'll use it and promote it for some time. Most of all as a commemoration to what once was.
And then go back to where opportunities aren't buried, but kept alive. Because they push our ecosystem into new and unknown territories. That's where the learning and progress is, not in nostalgia.