Members of the openSUSE’s election committee have provided notice to the project about the start of this year’s board election. This election there are three board seats up for grabs.

The election begins its nomination process on Nov. 15 and invites all eligible openSUSE members to participate in shaping the community’s future.

The open seats are currently held by Douglas DeMaio, Neal Gompa, and Patrick Fitzgerald. Board members serve as guides for the community, oversee some key project functions, facilitate community initiatives and handle responsibilities from organizing board meetings to managing openSUSE domains and trademarks. They also play a role in upholding community standards, including overseeing complaint processes and ensuring compliance with openSUSE’s Code of Conduct.

Election Timeline The election process will unfold over the next month. The plan is to follow this official schedule:

• Nov. 15: Official announcement, nominations open, membership drive begins
• Nov. 30: Final candidate list announced; campaign begins
• Dec. 1: Voting opens
• Dec. 15: Voting closes
• Dec. 16: Election results announced

How to Participate Any openSUSE member can stand for election by sending an email to project@lists.opensuse.org and election-officials@lists.opensuse.org. Members may also nominate others by contacting the Election Committee, who will follow up with the nominee to confirm their interest.

Eligibility Requirements According to the organization’s Election Rules, only current members are eligible to run for board positions. While new members are welcome to join during the membership drive and participate in the voting process, they will not be eligible to stand as candidates. The election committee overseeing this year’s event includes members Ish Sookun, Edwin Zakaria, and Ariez Vachha. The committee is responsible for ensuring a smooth election process and for finalizing the list of candidates by Nov. 30.

The openSUSE Project is excited to announce rsync.net as the latest Gold Sponsor!

The company’s support will empower the openSUSE community to continue building open-source solutions that serve users worldwide.

Rsync.net’s secure cloud storage and data backup solutions can assist openSUSE members with projects and package development. This is an excellent solution for securing offsite backups of critical data for a system. The cloud storage company rsync.net dedicates resources not only to the openSUSE Project, but to other open-source projects like Debian developers.

Through this partnership, openSUSE community members with an openSUSE email address can access 500 GB of free-forever storage. Members can also gain the additional benefits from rsync.net with affordable options for those who need even more space:

• Standard Single Region: $0.008 per GB per month, ensuring 99.9999% resiliency.
• Geo-Redundant Storage: $0.014 per GB per month, with automatic replication across regions for enhanced security.

Storage locations in Silicon Valley, Denver, Zurich, and Hong Kong can help to best suit developer needs.

The openSUSE Project values this partnership with rsync.net and its members appreciate the company’s commitment to support our community and open-source efforts.

For openSUSE members interested in rsync.net’s support, click here.

Members were informed about the sponsorship through the Factory mailing list. Members of openSUSE can view the perks of being a member of the project on the wiki.

Companies interested in supporting the openSUSE Community can find sponsorship details on our sponsors page. The project also accepts donations to support the community through the Geeko Foundation.

The openSUSE Project is excited to announce rsync.net as the latest Gold Sponsor!

The company’s support will empower the openSUSE community to continue building open-source solutions that serve users worldwide.

Rsync.net’s secure cloud storage and data backup solutions can assist openSUSE members with projects and package development. This is an excellent solution for securing offsite backups of critical data for a system. The cloud storage company rsync.net dedicates resources not only to the openSUSE Project, but to other open-source projects like Debian developers.

Through this partnership, openSUSE community members with an openSUSE email address can access 500 GB of free-forever storage. Members can also gain the additional benefits from rsync.net with affordable options for those who need even more space:

• Standard Single Region: $0.008 per GB per month, ensuring 99.9999% resiliency.
• Geo-Redundant Storage: $0.014 per GB per month, with automatic replication across regions for enhanced security.

Storage locations in Silicon Valley, Denver, Zurich, and Hong Kong can help to best suit developer needs.

The openSUSE Project values this partnership with rsync.net and its members appreciate the company’s commitment to support our community and open-source efforts.

For openSUSE members interested in rsync.net’s support, click here.

Members were informed about the sponsorship through the Factory mailing list. Members of openSUSE can view the perks of being a member of the project on the wiki.

Companies interested in supporting the openSUSE Community can find sponsorship details on our sponsors page. The project also accepts donations to support the community through the Geeko Foundation.

Managing localization of desktop menus and applications takes a specific tool and approach that fills a gap but leaves inconsistent upstream translations.

Open-source translation standards have advanced over the years and the downstream-only model being used has proven to become inefficient, which is why Update-Desktop-Files Deprecation efforts are developing.

Over the past two decades, SUSE’s translation system has grown to cover more than 5,747 packages, with a total of about 380,000 translated strings. These efforts are labor-intensive and often redundant since many translations upstream already exist. The update-desktop-files tool contradicts an upstream-first policy. The SUSE-specific translations override upstream versions, causing inconsistencies and duplicating translation work. It also limits package maintainers’ control as translations are often integrated during runtime, which then appear different from what package maintainers expect. The tool adds complexity and requires SUSE-specific infrastructure (e.g., SUSE intranet and OpenQA VPN) that complicates maintenance and makes it challenging to align with certain open-source practices.

Given these challenges, transitioning to an upstream-first approach aligns with openSUSE’s goals of reducing redundancy, improving translation quality and supporting community collaboration.

Starting with the new update-desktop-files release to Factory in November 2024, package maintainers are encouraged to check build logs for instructions on upstreaming SUSE-specific translations.

Below is the roadmap for these effort:

• November 2024: New version in Factory enables upstreaming of translations done over the past 20 years.
• Early 2025: Packages using the opaque translation process will start upstreaming changes.
• March 2025: Package maintainers review and propose changes to upstream projects.
• End of 2025: Upstream responses are integrated; package maintainers import changes to Factory.
• 2026: Any remaining SUSE-specific desktop files are patched. By year-end, the use of update-desktop-files will trigger errors, phasing it out completely.

To help in this transition, package maintainers should verify translations for Name, GenericName, Comment, and Keywords against upstream standards. Where applicable, patches can be generated using the update-desktop-files.tar.gz files, which provide various patch formats (e.g., -downstream-translated.diff for direct translations). Package maintainers should also update spec files, remove %suse_update_desktop_file and use the appropriate upstream translation mechanisms. Following the guidelines outlined in the openSUSE wiki page will help those who have questions.

The change is expected to use the upstream translations wherever possible, so the community can focus on openSUSE translations.

For more information, visit openSUSE wiki or subscribe to the translations mailing list.

Due to recent changes in the worker configuration of the SUSE internal openQA instance, we needed to reconfigure some of the PowerPC jobs in openQA. This triggered a couple of questions regarding the availability of openQA worker, worker backends, their differences and their caveats. This blog post should act as a quickstart/overview guide for people getting into OpenQA testing on the PowerPC architecture.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Over Europe, the days are getting shorter here, and it’s colder and greyer outside. This is all the more reason to spend time at your desk updating your Tumbleweed installation. This week, we gave you six snapshots to enjoy (1102, 1103, 1104, 1105, 1106, and 1107).

The most relevant updates delivered this week are:

• OpenJDK CPU updates for openjdk 1.8.0, 11, 17, 21, and 23
• GTK 4.16.5
• Linux kernel 6.11.6
• TigerVNC 1.14.1
• KDE Plasma 6.2.3
• libheif 1.19.1
• openSSL 3.2.3
• Ruby 3.3.6
• GStreamer 1.24.9
• Enchant 2.8.2

The next week will be really interesting, as we got fixes for Mesa 24.2.x submitted – and they passed staging already. For the next few days/weeks, we can expect these changes to happen:

• Mesa 24.2.6
• LLVM 19.1.3
• Swig 4.3.0
• KDE Gear 24.08.3
• KDE Frameworks 6.8.0
• Mozilla Firefox 132.0.1: removing the openSUSE specific KDE integration patches, relying on the xdg-desktop-portals for desktop integration
• Enabling python 3.13 modules; Python 3.11 will remain the default for now.

The openSUSE Project has announced the launch of a new initiative aimed at highlighting contributions of its diverse community members.

Dubbed “Contributor in the Spotlight,” the project aims to feature a different contributor each month and showcase their work in areas such as coding, art, documentation and more.

“It’s a great opportunity to get involved in the community and help ensure that our contributors receive the recognition they deserve,” wrote Tobias Görgens and Gertjan Lettink in an email on the project mailing list.

The program aims to increase visibility, provide recognition, express gratitude and to inspire others to contribute to open-source.

Many contributors’ efforts often go unnoticed and this initiative seeks to change this by sharing their stories and acknowledging their efforts to enhance open source development.

Contributors can apply to be featured by self-nomination though submitting an application by the 15th of each month. Nominations are permissible with the consent of the person being nominated. The selection process will focus on impact, uniqueness and relevance of their work to the project and beyond. Those chosen will be spotlighted in a blog post on the first Monday of the following month.

In addition to encouraging submissions, members of the project seek volunteers to help manage the initiative. Organizers will review applications, create blog posts and promote the project within the community.

Applications are now open, with the first feature expected to be published soon.

For more information, visit the mailing list email or the openSUSE GitHub page.

Last week, I submitted syslog-ng to openSUSE Leap 16.0. While the distro is still in a pre-alpha stage, everything already works for me as expected. Well, except for syslog-ng, where I found a number of smaller problems. As such, this blog is a call for testing, both for syslog-ng on openSUSE Leap 16.0 and also for the distribution itself.

Read the rest at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/call-for-testing-syslog-ng-in-opensuse-leap-16-0

Recently we kicked off a new feature in OBS: a request index page. It is unified for all the different places: the same UI is now also available in Project details page and in Package details page. The Request Index feature is part of the beta program. We started the redesign of the request index in August 2024 introducing a new UI to list all the requests replacing the “Tasks” place in the menu. In...

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Week 44 ended quickly, as Friday was a public holiday where I live. To not keep you wondering forever what happened this week, I took the time to write up the review of the week. Luckily, the stagings seemed to pass rather ‘on their own’ without much hand-holding, making things easier. We have published seven snapshots (1024, 1025, 1027, 1028, 1029, 1030, and 1031) since the last weekly review post..

The most relevant changes included in these snapshots were:

• KDE Plasma 6.2.2
• Linux kernel 6.11.5
• Util-Linux 2.40.2
• GPG 2.5.1
• PHP 8.3.13
• PAM 1.7.0
• Inkscape 1.4
• openSSL 3.1.7
• Qemu 9.1.1

Staging projects are ‘crowded’, mainly with a few experiments (some of them might a bit longer to deliver):

• Linux kernel 6.11.6
• openSSL 3.2.x
• Enabling python 3.13 modules; Python 3.11 will remain the default for now.
• Swig 4.3.0: Needs fixed for ldns and libftdi1
• LLVM 19 / Mesa 24.2.x: no changes for the last few weeks: openQA still sees inverted colors

Generic call for help: Since changing the compiler to GCC 14 in August, we still lack many build fixes. The expectation was that maintainers would catch the build failures in the devel projects and act on them. Unfortunately, that only happened on about 25% of the observed failures. To make the remaining ones more prominent, I triggered rebuilds of all the failing packages. This will trigger the build-fail-reminder to inform maintainers in the next few days. An up-to-date list of current failures can be found at https://tinyurl.com/ysy4nnnz