Durante la openSUSE Conference 2009 di Norimberga abbiamo avuto il piacere di fare quattro chiacchiere con Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager della distribuzione tedesca. Uno dei personaggi di spicco della comunità openSUSE ci ha svelato in anteprima tutte le novità della prossima release 11.2, il cui rilascio è previsto per la seconda metà di novembre. All’interno tutte le risposte di Andreas alle nostre domande (in inglese).

- Hi Andreas, thank you for your availability. Some simple questions to introduce you to our readers to start. What’s your role at openSUSE/Novell and what do you do in your spare time? What are your hobbies?

Hi Vincenzo, I’m glad to see you at the first openSUSE conference! Inside Novell I’m tasked basically with making the openSUSE project successful. I have the title of “Program Manager openSUSE” and work closely with Zonker, Michael Löffler and the Community Multiplier Team. I’m filling internally a management role for openSUSE – in the project itself I try to help where I can.  One new focus of mine will be the openSUSE Build Service which is a great tool to collaborate on distribution binary packages. Most of my spare time is now taken by my little daughter and currently she’s the subject of my hobby of taking photos.  You can find some of my less private photos here.

- Here we’re at openSUSE Conference: what are its main purposes?

The purpose of the conference is to bring our world-wide community together to meet face to face –  there are many that I have emailed with but never met -, to collaborate and to get inspired by talks and sessions.

- We want to know more about the features of the next openSUSE 11.2.

We put some focus on social networks like Facebook and Twitter and improved some applications and added new applications to the desktop. These applicatoins allow a better user expierence than the default webbased interfaces. The two new applications are choqok and gwibber.  Gwibber is a popular GNOME client that includes support for Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca.  Choqok is a new KDE client that supports Twitter and Identi.ca.  Additionally the KDE kopete IM client supports now facebook.

Partitioning and filesystems saw improvements, we now have ext4 as default file system and first support for the – currently experimental – Btrfs filesystem. The YaST partioner interface has seen many usability improvements based on the feedback we received for openSUSE 11.1.
Package management and download experience has been improved further, so we now have better  mirror handling and fallback to mirrors with aria2c, a possibility to first download all packages and then install them and many improvements to the user interface of the zypper command line tool. We also support live updates from openSUSE 11.1 to 11.2 via “zypper dup”, this makes especially remote updates easier but also allows users to follow the development version (called openSUSE Factory) more easily.

The Open Source community has made a lot of improvements in the projects we include and I can only highlight a few of these:

• GNOME users will notice a fresh new look to openSUSE 11.2 in the windows and user interface, called Sonar. We will have GNOME 2.28 as current version.
• KDE 4.3 brings many changes including a new design and improvements to kmail. Mozilla Firefox is now also under KDE the default web brower.
• Mozilla Firefox 3.5  gives users more control over their browsing experience, including a Ctrl-Tab switch between tabs and a private browsing mode.
• OpenOffice.org 3.1  delivers even more new improvements to the office suite, such as the ability to carry out a structured conversation through the word processor’s commenting functions, and major improvements to the graphics drawing application.

- openSUSE will be defaulting to the KDE desktop starting with openSUSE 11.2. Our readers want to know more about this choice. Why KDE and not GNOME?

Let me first explain what was decided: It was decided to pre-select in the DVD installer the KDE desktop. Therefore, with openSUSE 11.2 release, the KDE desktop will be installed if the user accepts the default setting. Users can also choose the GNOME desktop at this stage.
The decision was made because of usability (openSUSE defaults everywhere, just not here and this can confuse new users) and to preselect KDE was based on popularity of KDE by openSUSE users.

Both GNOME and KDE are considered equal citizens within the openSUSE project, and this will not have any impact on the quality of the GNOME desktop within openSUSE. GNOME will continue to be offered as a top-level installation choice, and we will continue to strive to provide the best GNOME and KDE desktop experience.

- Can you give us some news about Novell App Store? Do you think that is really the right choice to bring the wealth of open-source software to everyday users?

The openSUSE Build Service is a mainly developer tool to make binary packages from Open Source software, it contains packages of different quality and everyday users might get confused which stable application to install. For that we have been discussing several things and some community members started working as well on a software store.  The Novell App Store is a great idea – and still an idea.

- openSUSE is surely one of the most used and appreciated GNU/Linux distribution in the world. But, do you think that openSUSE will reach – one day – the success of other operating systems like OS X and Windows? In which way do you think to accomplish a similar goal?

Linux is already a successful player in the server market. The key question on the desktop is around proper support for multimedia and for hardware devices. On the hardware front I see good progress with project’s like the Linux driver project that Greg KH leads. There also seems to be a lot of pressure on companies to support Open Source drivers and more companies are seeing that this is beneficial to them. I see with Moblin and the way the Netbooks are positioned, Linux in a very good position. Novell and openSUSE have been engaged with Moblin for some time now and you can download a Moblin image of openSUSE (called Goblin right now).

- Everybody talk about GNU/Linux but seems that not so many peoples trust Linux for now (some statistics talk about 0.xx% of the Linux world usage). What is the problem? Nevertheless Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora are really great operating systems. Do you think it’s just a matter of marketing or because the lack of some packages?

Lack of some killer applications is a matter in my opinion.  We have great applications like OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox but those are available on other OSes as well and might make it easy for people to switch but do not push them to switch. A large part of the problem is also that a large part of the population is not well-informed about Linux  – in other words we need to improve marketing significantly.

- Are you working with some computer vendor (other than MSI) to sell openSUSE-based desktops and laptops?

Novell has resources working closely with computer vendors to produce fully-enabled pre-installed systems. The focus is on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and allows Novell to provide indemnification and long term support to end-customers. All the innovation that the openSUSE community harvest into the openSUSE distribution find their way into SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

- What do you think about your competitors? Fedora/Red Hat, Ubuntu and Mandriva are doing good work as well as openSUSE on Linux desktop.

The competition is Apple and Microsoft. With Fedora, Ubuntu and Mandriva we share the vision of  Free and Open Source Software and work also in different ways together, especially on an individual developer base.

- What are the next openSUSE plans? Are there any interesting initiatives in progress?

One interesting initiative is the Webfrontend to YaST which will allow both local and remote administration of a system. openSUSE 11.2 is supposed to see the first few modules for this.

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