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OpenSUSE 13.1 Released and Reviewed

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

sfcrazy writes "The openSUSE team just announced the release of openSUSE 13.1. There are some core points which set openSUSE apart from the popular Ubuntu distro. While Ubuntu has become a more or less Canonical-owned project, openSUSE is becoming more and more community-driven. Looking at the recent controversies around Ubuntu and their move toward mobile platforms, openSUSE seems to be a great option for desktop users."

1 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Sad. Very sad. We OpenSUSE has major issues. RPM. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Needing to go to random repositories sucks. It makes users less safe and until distributions understand the threat of non-free software they're going to continue to suck. From a privacy stand point as well as a vulnerability standpoint (and I'm not talking security here- I'm talking vulnerability to players like Adobe, Oracle, and Microsoft, who drop support, etc).

    We also need to consider that free software isn't free. Its dependent on user contributions. And not just developers. We need users to make larger contributions and become financially supporting members thereof. $250 every few years to Microsoft for anti-virus software, OS software, and office software means nothing. To the majority of truly free software projects it means everything. Right now there are many projects at risk because of the lack of financial contributions by users.

    We need to ignore the users who say “don't bother me with money requests on the download page/advertising/etc”. While we don't want to overdo or mislead (as Canonical probably has done) every project should make it unavoidably clear a financial contribution is needed each and every time the software is obtained and just how much. A small project might need $100 whereas a large project (say Debian) may need nothing. However where that large project is at the forefront (distributions) they have an obligation to request money on behalf of the developers whose software they include.