The openSUSE community began the process for openSUSE Board Elections 2023. The process is a celebration of community involvement and a cornerstone of our open-source spirit.

The elections are structured into three distinct phases, each playing a crucial role in selecting dedicated leaders to steer the project’s future.

Phase 0: Setting the Stage

Phase 0, which started Nov. 15, marks the initiation of the Board Election process. This period serves as the Call for Nominations and Applications for Board candidacy. Individuals interested in running for the openSUSE Board are urged to step forward, mindful of the significant two-year commitment required for the role. Candidates must be openSUSE members, and the Election Committee ensures a fair process by prohibiting committee officials from standing for election to avoid conflicts of interest. This process runs until Nov. 30.

Phase 1: Campaign and Awareness

Following the closure of the announcement process, Phase 1 starts on Dec. 1. This stage sparks the campaign period where candidates showcase their vision, plans, and aspirations for openSUSE. The community becomes the focal point of the campaigners.

Phase 2: Voting Time

Transitioning into Phase 2 on Dec. 15, the community takes center stage in influencing the project’s direction. Ballots open, allowing eligible members to cast their votes via a secure electronic system. Each vote is crucial and shapes the leadership that will guide openSUSE in the upcoming years. There are two seats available for this year’s board.

For any inquiries or clarifications, individuals can reach out to the committee at election-officials@opensuse.org.

By actively participating in the openSUSE Board Elections 2023, every member contributes to the shared vision of a stronger, more resilient open-source community.

The countdown has begun and we look forward to reading the announcements from the new candidates on the openSUSE Project mailing list.

openSUSE.Asia Summit 2024: Call for Host

The openSUSE.Asia Summit is an annual openSUSE conference in Asia and a great opportunity where contributors and enthusiasts from Asia come together and meet face to face. The event focuses primarily on the openSUSE distribution, its applications for personal and enterprise use, and open source culture.

In 2023, we held an offline openSUSE Asia Summit from October 21-22 at Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

And we ready to call for hosts to you who are interested in hosting the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2024

Here is the date you need take notes:

• March 4: Deadline of application
• March 31: Announcement of the next host

openSUSE:Asia Summit Tips for Organizers at: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Asia_Summit_Tips_for_Organizers

Please refer to it before writing your proposal.

How to Submit ?

Please send your proposal by email to both opensuse-summit@opensuse.org and opensuseasia-summit@googlegroups.com. Proposal should contain:

• Venue and capacity (we prefer using campus building, but any alternative can be discuss later)
• How to reach your city and venue
• Budget Estimation
  • Conference Venue
  • T-shirt
  • Tea break, Lunch, Dinner, Conference Tour, etc.
• Introduction to your community who will organize the summit

Please help to spread the words and we are looking forward to hearing from you soon!

Further information about openSUSE.Asia Summit is available at: https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Asia_Summit

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

We are slowly but surely reaching the end of the year 2023 with just six more weeks to go. This week we had some minor glitches on the publishing side: snapshot 1109 had been marked for publishing, but the syncing never happened. As this was just over the weekend, nobody noticed this until Monday, when the next snapshot was already pending in the publisher queue (and also not going out). The issue was then swiftly rectified with the help of the build service team. As a consequence, only the four snapshots 1110, 1113, 1114, and 1115 have been published. The changes from 1109 are not lost: they were still present in the subsequently published snapshots.

The most relevant changes to report during this week are:

• Linux kernel 6.6.1
• KDE Gear 23.08.2
• KDE Frameworks 5.112.0
• Binutils 2.41
• gAWK 5.3.0
• PostgreSQL 16.1
• Mozilla Firefox 119.0.1
• libeconf 0.6.0

In the future – near or far – you can count on those changes to reach you:

• GStreamer 1.22.7
• sudo: optional addon configuration for groups wheel or sudo (asking for current user’s password)
• RPM 4.19
• dbus-broker as the default dbus daemon

A large amount of software updates made it into openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots this week.

Most snapshots came with several new versions for those who used their command line to zypper dup.

While snapshot 20231114 was as enormous as snapshots starting off the week, there were a significant amount of software updates. The open-source client for Enterprise Identity Management sssd updates to version 2.9.3. This update empowers the proxy provider to handle certificate mapping and matching rules. Users managed by the proxy provider can now be configured for local Smartcard authentication, which improves authentication options. An update of xterm 388 enhances the disallowPasteControls function by adding a category for special characters known to stty. The new version also includes the updating of config.guess and config.sub. Improved messages in the configure script were made with the ncurses 6.4.20231111 update, and it had a patch that modified the reset command to avoid altering clocal when the terminal employs a modem. Color management package argyllcms updates to 3.0.2 fixes a typo in a module that affected retail i1D3 functionality and fixes crashes with the device link profiles and an update of libstorage-ng 4.5.156 merges a specific GitHub issue and extends the testsuite. Several RubyGems updated in the snapshot. There was an arm image 20231114 snapshot that updates for packages released from earlier in the week. Linux Kernel 6.6.1 and both KDE Frameworks 5.112.0 and KDE Gear 23.08.3 became available for the arm rolling release’s contributors and users.

Frameworks 5.112.0 was released for other architectures in snapshot 20231113. An update of NetworkManagerQt fixed an incorrect signal signature, removed an inaccurate comment and adjusted event listening to accommodate both DBus service registration events and interface added events. There was a replacement of slow with fsType in naming conventions for KIO and KConfig made adjustments in kconfigwatcher to avoid asserting absolute paths and had modifications in dbussanitizer preventing trailing slashes; the update enhances security measures by preventing attempts to send or receive DBus notifications on absolute paths. The ffmpeg-6 6.0.1 version make improvements to AVCodecs, AVformat, and AVfilters a patch was dropped as it was resolved upstream. Mozilla Firefox 119.0.1 had critical bugs affecting HTML elements’ functionality and resolves issues related to color application. The 23.2 version of python311-packaging had changes to parsing markers and improves support for enriched metadata, documentation updates and addressing vulnerabilities by updating the pip. The 41.0.5 version of python-cryptography focuses on enhancements and adjustments related to its integration with OpenSSL. This update has a new function to support an upcoming release of pyOpenSSL. An update of createrepo_c 1.0.2 made changes that prevent building without zstd and removes the dependency on libmagic. An update of the mail transfer agent (MTA) for email handling, postfix, updated to version 3.8.3. The package update addresses a defect in the Postfix SMTP server related to client certificate verification errors in TLS wrapper mode. The update also resolves syntax errors in the update_postmaps script and adjusts permissions caused by config.postfix. Several other packages were updated in the snapshot.

While KDE Gear 23.08.3 was later updated in the 20231114 arm image, it was released in snapshot 20231110. The Ark compression/decompression utility n resolves some file format issues and MIME type handling. It also has fixes related to opening AppImage files, checks using outdated ISO mimetypes, and adjusted hardcoded bzip2 mimetypes in tests for greater flexibility. Dolphin made updates reflecting the relocation of KActivities from Frameworks to Plasma. The modifications contribute to improved functionality and alignment within the file manager. There were an enormous amount of changes with Kdenlive in the Gear update. The update fixes timeremap, ensures proper audio handling during clip replacement, addresses project duration inaccuracies, prevents subtitle styling losses, enhances rendering and improves keyframe handling and clip resizing functionalities. Linux Kernel 6.6.1 arrived in the snapshot also before the arm image snapshot and it had bug fixes for several driver modules and compatibility enhancements for specific hardware devices to include adjustments for serial, USB, Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, Bluetooth, and more. An update of gimp 2.10.36 includes support for ASE (Adobe Swatch Exchange) and ACB (Adobe Color Book) palettes and a new gradient option. This is enhanced support for non-square ratio GIFs and an improved text tool formatting behavior. An update of postgresql16 16.1 adds support for LLVM 16 and 17. It also had some security fixes including handling unknown-type arguments and preventing an integer overflow when computing new array dimensions. Update of binutils 2.41, gawk 5.3.0 and more arrived in the snapshot.

I love the melodies of Metallica songs. However, I strongly prefer instrumental music. That’s why I was very happy, when someone brought Apocalyptica to my attention: they played Metallica on four cellos. Over the years I discovered that metal or any other music sounds nice on cellos, as I learned about two more bands: 2cellos and Mozart Heroes.

But I should not rush so far ahead. In the year 2000 someone introduced me to Metallica. I loved the melodies, but I’m not a great fan of singing. A few months later another friend introduced me to Apocalyptica, when learned about my problem. The same wonderful melodies, but purely instrumental music. First I bought their first album: “Apocalyptica plays Metallica by Four Cellos” and soon after also the second one: “Inquisition Symphony”.

TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/248123832 and https://listen.tidal.com/album/109813970

The next album I heard from Apocalyptica also featured a singer. That’s not something for me. That’s when I learned from a colleague about 2Cellos, a Croatian cellist duo. They played a wide variety of arrangements, everything from classical, through rock to pop. I quickly listened to all of their albums on TIDAL, and watched some of their videos on YouTube. This is my favorite:

TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/38440446/track/38440450

I learned about Mozart Heroes from a friend who’s son plays the cello. It is not purely cello music, as the other member of the band plays the guitar. Still, it was instant love. They also play arrangements, often combining a classical piece with something modern in the very same song. Sometimes the transition from one melody to the other is completely seamless. In the video below they combine Mozart and Metallica in a song:

TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/artist/9200105

For almost two decades I did not follow Apocalyptica, as the new music I heard from them was not purely instrumental. As Covid broke out, many concert tours were canceled. Some of these were replaced by free on-line streaming. I do not remember how I learned that Apocalyptica would also be performing an online concert, but as I did not have anything better to do, I watched it. It was pure instrumental, and love at first sight, so I bought the new album as soon as it became available in Hungary. Below I link the whole concert, which I watched live 3.5 years ago.

TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/125174900

Nobody is perfect, so there is a little twist in my story. The original reason I fell in love with cello arrangements was that they were all instrumental. There was no singing. A good friend mentioned that Apocalyptica is coming in our part of Europe, but unfortunately playing together with another band, and there is singing. I listened to it, and to my greatest surprise, despite the vocals, it was absolutely beautiful. To me, anyway :-)

TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/261401831

Version 1.9.15 of sudo gives more detailed information when using the -ll option. For commands, it adds the rule that allows it. Without a command parameter, it lists rules affecting a given user. It also prints which file contains the given rule, making debugging easier.

You can read more about it at https://www.sudo.ws/posts/2023/11/more-info-with-ll-in-sudo-1.9.15/

The November syslog-ng newsletter is now on-line:

• Sending logs to Splunk using syslog-ng
• Developing a syslog-ng configuration
• Systemd-journald vs. syslog-ng

It is available at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/the-syslog-ng-insider-2023-11-splunk-configuration-journald

Hello LibreOffice Planet!

This is my first blog post on the topic of LibreOffice. Let me quickly explain my link to LibreOffice. I work for a data protection authority in the EU and help navigate the digital transformation of our office with about 100 staff members. While many of our partner organisations adopt Microsoft 365, our office decided to pilot Nextcloud with Collabora Office Online.

In the future, I want to blog (in my personal capacity) about my thoughts related to the use of alternative word processing software in the public sector in general and in our specific case.

As there are no dedicated resources for training, preparation of templates etc., during the pilot of LibreOffice, the experience so far covers a large spectrum of user satisfaction. Generally, our staff has been spent years of their life using Microsoft Office and has the expectation that any other software works the same way. If it does not, they send an email to me (best case) or switch back to Microsoft Office.

During the week, I discussed again some smaller LibreOffice bugs. Then, I showed this weekend some FOSS Blender animated short videos to family members. It seems that Blender is more successful in its domain than LibreOffice. Is that possible? Or are animated short videos just more capturing due to their special effects? 😅

You can watch the 1min Blender animated short movie “CREST” on Youtube or the making-off. The latter you find here below.

I find it very inspiring to see what talented artists can do with Blender. For my part, I have once installed Blender and deinstalled it. Back then it was not easy to use for people not familiar with video animation software. Blender competes with proprietary software such as Maya or Cinema 4D. The latter is about 60 USD per month in the annual subscription plan. Not exactly cheap.

Then, I read in the fediverse about people working with LibreOffice:

I just tried to use #LibreOffice #Draw to draw some arrows and boxes onto JPEG images for emphasizing stuff.

The UX is really bad for somebody not working with Draw all the time.

Whatever I do, instead of drawing onto the image, the image gets selected instead.

Could not find any layer-sidebar.

Could not scale text without starting the “Character …” menu, modifying font size blindly + confirming > just to see its effect and then start all over.

Dear #FOSS, we really should do better.

— Author Karl Voit (12 November 2023 at 14:51)

In my past, I have worked on online voting systems. They are not very good yet despite years of efforts. xkcd dedicated a comic to voting software

Elections seem simple—aren’t they just counting? But they have a unique, challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. And they have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to be affordable and maintainable, and usable by voters, election officials, and pollworkers.

— Author Matthew Bernhard et al. in their paper Public Evidence from Secret Ballots from 2017

What is the unique challenge of developing word processing software? Happy to hear back from you in the blog comments or on the companion fediverse post!

Spoilers: it’s not about whether remote or office work is better.

The prevalence of return to office mandates has provoked much discourse and strong opinions. For good reasons. Return to office mandates can tear teams apart by pushing out people who cannot relocate, at huge cost.   

Cost of Attrition

Working physically together, in the same space, as a whole team, can be extremely enabling. Supporting a joyful environment. Sadly, too many offices were (and remain) environments hostile to collaboration. Return to those hostile environments has been imposed on many.

It makes me sad to see people…

…forced to return to offices that are noisy, cramped, illness-spreading, collaboration-killing environments. 

…conversing over video chat from across the same open-plan office, because while they’re in the same space it’s not set up to help them collaborate.

…excluded from teamwork because the rest of the team is in another location.

…stuck waiting on pull request reviews from people they are sat right next to.

Most of all I get sad when I see ineffective teams with no ability or motivation to improve—whether remote or co-located.

For many teams there can be huge advantages to co-located working, but these aren’t it. Different approaches better support different people, different teams, different contexts. 

Return to office mandates can destroy the effectiveness of teams who have uncovered better ways of working by going remote.

Tearing your teams apart and undermining their ways of working are tremendously damaging. Fabled watercooler serendipity will not make up for this.

You’ll cause harm by forcing RTO on teams with cultures that benefit from remote. Please, instead, help your teams craft their best environment. 

Remote isn’t always Best

Many people are very passionate about remote work. Remote can bring inclusion benefits. Offices can bring communication bandwidth benefits. 

This claim crossed my feed this week:

“Every successful company needs to have the most talented people. The most talented people no longer live in, or want to live in the same place.” 

This suggests that “acquiring” talented people is a zero-sum game. It’s not.

Rather, successful companies maximise what their people can achieve. One factor is indeed how talented the people who join are. Another is their pre-existing skills. Even more significant than these is the extent to which the organisation amplifies & accelerates, or impedes their abilities.  

A little rant about talent

Different organisations, and different ways of working, are more or less suited to make different individuals the most effective.  

Don’t Compromise

Mediocre teams compromise on their ways of working to avoid conflict; sacrificing their team’s potential on the altar of individual autonomy. 

Effective teams find ways of working that give themselves an advantage. They shape their environment to maximise their effectiveness. 

Mediocre teams compromise on their ways of working to avoid conflict; sacrificing their team’s potential on the altar of individual autonomy. 

Hybrid work policies can easily result in the downsides of being anchored to an office location, with none of the benefits that could come from having everyone together.

It doesn’t just happen with location. Individual preferences for working exclusively in certain parts of the codebase can result in nobody working together towards the same mission. People who feel they get more done if left to their own devices for days or weeks are often right, and it can also be true that the team as a whole is less successful.

It’s easy to avoid conflict and get stuck in mediocrity. Optimising for individual happiness can result in less of the joy that people find in teams that achieve great things together.

Optimising for individual happiness can result in less of the joy that people find in teams that achieve great things together.

If only effective collaboration had such an easy answer as asking everyone to come to an office. 

If you want to build up your teams rather than undermine them, start with curiosity about how they work. Invite and support them to uncover better ways of working for them. What helps them. Their preferences. Their lives. Their mission. Their constraints.

I’m privileged to have experienced working with many effective & ineffective teams & communities. Both in office environments and remotely, with a variety of collaboration styles.

I’ve experienced some of my most joyful work in teams working together in the same space. I’ve benefited from flexibility and inclusion with remote work. I’ve also been able to contribute as part of larger open source communities where I couldn’t even know everyone by name. There are plenty of reasons to be passionate about each approach. 

What I am most passionate about is teams finding the most effective ways to work together. Joy for the individuals involved. Successful team missions. Turning the constraints they’re working with to their advantage.

Beyond a Binary Debate

There are more options than just Office vs Remote. Distributed vs Co-located working is often conflated with Async vs Synchronous working styles. It’s not one or the other.

By Async I mean working independently. Coordinating via tickets, pull requests, mailing lists etc. 

By Sync I mean working together, on the same thing, at the same time—and not necessarily at the same place.  

Those who’ve experienced greatness at one extreme on this chart are often enthusiastic. Top-right and bottom-left have many proponents. However, bottom right can be glorious as well, and this seems to be less discussed. Fans of Async-Remote sometimes characterise Sync-Remote as being “unable to let go of the office”. However, I’ve seen it work tremendously well—often far better than the typical office space allows. 

Teams often compromise somewhere near the middle. A hybrid of workplaces and work-ways. Accommodating a variety of preferences and needs. 

The best teams I’ve seen move towards an edge and find a sweet spot. You can imagine a third dimension of effectiveness. With a pit in the centre.

Office and Async — Escape the Tragedy

I’ve not found a scenario where this quadrant is better than an alternative, despite it being, in my experience, the most common for most “teams”. Where teams are acting more like a mere convenient grouping of individuals than a collective with a common mission.

Don’t suffer and merely survive, aided by your noise cancelling headphones.

This scenario often arises through compromise on ways of working that are the least objectionable to everyone in the team. In contrast, better ways of working tend to arise from finding what works and turning it up to the extreme.

I’m interested to hear from you if you have seen a team better off in the Office & Async quadrant than they would be in another.

If you’re stuck in this quadrant, and you’re not finding it joyful, consider a move to another. Don’t suffer and merely survive, aided by your noise cancelling headphones.

Option 1: Move remote, to get the true benefits of Async 

If you have the luxury of working remotely, and you prefer working asynchronously, then remote will open up lots of benefits.

You’ll avoid commutes. You’ll enable hiring from anywhere, including a wide geographical spread, making it easier to hire great people. You’ll increase timezone coverage for progress that never stops and improve operational coverage. 

Option 2: Move together, to enable Sync

If your team are all spread out within the same office, bring your desks together. Control your space as much as possible. Use the wall space. Separate your area with whiteboards / soundproofing.

If this isn’t possible, consider booking meeting rooms out where you could go to work together. It’s amazing how infrequently large meetings get questioned. Whereas making small changes to enhance the space you’re working in sometimes alarms bureaucracies.

Working in the same space will enable ad-hoc discussions. It facilitates pair programming with regular rotations. You can make the things most important to you visible in the workspace. You’ll also overhear opportunities to help each other.

Option 3: Move remote, to enable Sync 

If you can’t move your desks but have the luxury of working remotely, you could move to the bottom right to make collaboration easier. Then try some of the ways of working mentioned below.

Remote and Async — Open Source Style

Many of the best ways of working in this quadrant have emerged from the ways that distributed open source communities work. Pull requests. Mailing lists. Decision frameworks based on written proposals. 

This style enables large groups of people to collaborate effectively to achieve large things. Often larger than a traditional team could achieve. Sometimes at the cost of speed of decisions. 

Office and Sync — XP Style

Extreme Programming Practices are a great starting point for office & sync. Then experiment and iterate towards what works best for you.

If you have the luxury of being in the same space—be in the same space. i.e. get your desks together. Get big desks so you can sit and work together. Customise your space to be informative & facilitate collaboration. Track things on the walls. Keep living diagrams on whiteboards. Put up big displays with production metrics. 

One of the nice things about using a physical whiteboard as the information radiator in a team was
a) the ease of modifying the process visualisation and
b) the reinforcement of the constant reminder

Subtle effect from opinionated tools like Jira/Trello is stifling this. pic.twitter.com/HJeqeZR7t0

— Benji Weber :: @benjiweber@mastodon.social (@benjiweber) February 13, 2022

Remote and Sync — Learn what works

Less has been written about this quadrant. Kent Beck wrote this article recently which partly inspired this post. 

During the pandemic I saw several teams stuck in the Async-Colocated quadrant discover the benefits of collaborative practices. 

re-discovery of XP practices unimpeded by hostile offices

Teams stuck working as isolated individuals within the same office were freed. Absent the noisy office environments where they were artificially separated, they could start working together, in a remote-first way. 

Teams discovered new ways. These included re-discovery of XP practices unimpeded by hostile offices.

Eliminate wasteful Meetings

I saw teams inverting what they used synchronous time for. Things they did together through mere habit, like status updates for stakeholders, became async. Boring meetings of status updates that could be slack messages became slack messages. 

Instead, sync time was protected for actual collaboration. The higher cost of sync time when remote due to lower bandwidth incentivised using it more wisely. 

Always-on Zoom

An always-on video call for teams allowed people to drop in and out to work with each other and catch up on work others were doing in parallel. Analogous to a dedicated team war-room in an office. Without the bureaucratic hurdles to setting one up. Nor the challenge of competing with nearby teams for noise.

Dashboard Nudges 

Automated daily screenshots of dashboards with team KPIs. Regular snapshots sent to teams’ Slack channels replaced the physical TVs from the physical office. These nudges provoked conversation, increasing awareness of both the success of features, and production risks. 

Team Games

Opportunities to relax and have fun together needed to be intentional. Web based multi-player remote games were a go-to for several teams.

Virtual Whiteboarding

Discussions and brainstorms sometimes worked even better than their in-person alternatives. Unlike physical whiteboards, in virtual space there’s no problems with everyone crowding around. Nobody can hog the view. Everyone can participate at once. Not to mention saving a fortune in post-it notes. 

Pair Programming 

Pair programming works well when remote. For many teams it works better remotely; their office environments being so hostile to in-person collaboration. No longer having to compete with the din, pairs could focus.

Communication bandwidth isn’t as high as in-person, but the tooling to work together remotely has come a long way. Tools like VSCode Live-share, and Tuple make working together a breeze. Tooling like mob enables fast handover.  

Continuous Integration

True continuous integration (integrating to main multiple times per day) is even more valuable when you don’t have the opportunity to overhear what others are working on.

Do you CI?

Serendipity is not a Strategy

All quadrants benefit from intentionally defining and writing down ways of working, rather than relying on accidental interactions and happenstance in an office.

Don’t rely on watercooler moments.

If you want folks to have unstructured conversations from which new ideas might emerge, create those opportunities intentionally. There are lots of mechanisms to increase luck and the chances of useful conversations occurring. e.g. No-pre-planned meeting days. Blocked lunch breaks. Group volunteering. Team meals. Quarterly Offsites. Retrospectives. 

Look for what’s working for your team and turn it up. Try changing things and uncovering better ways of working!

Uncovering Better Ways

The post Tragedy of Return to Hostile Offices appeared first on Benji's Blog.