GNU/Linux in Germany (SUSE and FSFE)

I’d like to illustrate my view on it with a simple example:
When you visit opensuse.org there’s a menu item top right named “contribute”. Clicking it brings you to the contribution bit of the page. There you have choice between two things: Code and Hardware. Now if we’re lucky a potential contributor will click on “Code” and gets presented four slightly unmotivated lines of text and a button to “find out more”. That’s not how to be friendly and inviting. Let’s hope not too much people are turned down by that.

But what I see as a way bigger problem – and some kind of basic pattern in oS – is that behind the “find out…” button in fact there would be really good and detailed information on how to contribute. Documentation, testing, translations and so on is all there. But it’s not communicated in any reasonable way! It’s hidden in different places, buried deeply in the wiki. The wiki is a good place for extensively written explanations but not for getting a first step into the pool.

So my idea is part of a whole to-be-defined restructuring of opensuse.org. I proposed a few thoughts a while ago but got curbed due to the renaming/rebranding discussion back then. Yet I still have these things on my list to discuss and tackle. [1]

Of course the website is just one puzzle part. The whole getting fresh blood (as you called it) thing needs further pushing. Hence the initiative of the marketing team to get special t-shirts for Leap 15.2. Beta testers. [2]
This is something easily to be communicated to the outside and can be a door opener for new people. Though it is not a board member’s job there. But I think it’s good to have a board taking part in this whole communication
initiative.

On my machines I run openSUSE Leap (download), a stable distribution that follows the SUSE Linux Enterprise service packs. But frequently my task is to reproduce or fix a bug in openSUSE Tumbleweed (download), the hottest rolling distribution.

In the past, I would take an ISO image of the installation DVD and install a virtual machine from scratch. (To say nothing about burning a CD, copying a boot floppy, and reinstalling a physical machine. I've been doing this for too long.)

Fortunately, things got easier with ready-made disk images for containers (Docker/Podman) and virtual machines (Vagrant).

Genau dafür setzt sich die Kampagne Public Money for Public Code der Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) ein.

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