Looking around, I’m seeing a lot of great stuff going on in the openSUSE community — watching the openSUSE-marketing list, I’m seeing a lot of work being done on Sneak Peeks and publishing and translating openSUSE Weekly News.

And there’s more! The Contrib repo is moving forward, which should be a major step forward in terms of getting new packages in and maintained by community members and making those easy to access for openSUSE users.

There’s work being done to support ARM in the openSUSE Build Service. I had a chance to sit down with Martin Mohring in Munich to talk about ARM and openSUSE on new platforms while I was in Germany last week, and I’m really impressed and excited by all the work that’s going into supporting ARM with openSUSE, and the possibilities.

Oh, and I keep hearing something about a release next week, too… If you haven’t, make sure you grab one of the countdown banners and display them proudly on your Website! Like so:

I guess this is why Ars says that openSUSE is one of the best distros of the year:

OpenSUSE is one of the oldest Linux distributions, but it has gone through some significant changes since its original launch in 1994. Under Novell’s stewardship, OpenSUSE has become significantly more inclusive and community-driven. The distro announced its first community-elected board this year and has grown its base of contributors considerably. The distro has also made major technical advancements, including major improvements to its package management system and support for installation from a Live CD.

OpenSUSE delivers a powerful user experience and is one of the few distros that provides equally outstanding support for both GNOME and KDE. Its KDE 4 environment is the best out there, which is why OpenSUSE has become the reference distro for all of our KDE reviews. Its GNOME environment is also top-notch and provides the perfect selection of applications in the default installation.

I’m continually impressed and inspired by all the work that goes into openSUSE. As always, there’s always more work ahead. But, if you step back and look at the state of the project today compared to a year ago, or two years ago, there’s been clear progress on every front — and no signs of slowing down.

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