Hi Atri, I think the biggest problem I have answering your questions is that you seem to assume I know the answer to the very question I asked in my original post. The SUSE ALP Products are being built and the code will be made available for openSUSE to reuse. You can get your hands on the prototypes for SUSE's ALP Products to see how they work: https://www.suse.com/c/suse-salp-raises-the-bar-on-confidential-computing/ But, just because this is the direction SUSE is going in, doesn't mean that's all openSUSE has to do. We're getting the codebase, we can decide what we do with it, hence, the core question I ask in my post - what does openSUSE want to build? Without that being answered, I really cant properly answer your below questions, but I'll try and give some ideas.
* As a user: I buy/have a laptop/desktop, if needed reduce the Windows to its deserved 20 GiB disk-space, and install openSUSE on the rest. This is sometimes Tumbleweed, sometimes (very rarely these days, admittedly) Leap. How would my work-flow in downloading and installing the distro — currently involving downloading an iso image, dd-ing it to USB stick, booting up, and enjoying YaST's installer do its thing — change?
The SUSE ALP Prototypes all use Agama (formerly D-Installer) as their installer, not YaST. One nice thing with Agama is that you typically download a single ISO and that ISO offers _all_ the related 'Products' So, assuming openSUSE's ALP offerings include all of SUSE's ALP Products AND one (or more) community build offerings, I imagine we won't have separate installation ISO's for everything, and have one openSUSE ALP Installer ISO that offers Bedrock, Micro, and whatever the community builds. But, that's a whole bunch of assumptions with that vision - does openSUSE build anything based on ALP? would it make sense to offer alongside the openSUSE versions of SUSE's ALP Server/Cloud-Native products? Do people really want to build an old fashioned YaST installer and are willing to do all that work? I dunno, and so I cant really say your question is answered.
For that matter, as a user how will this affect my 'zypper this', 'zypper that' (sounds awful, pardon me!) habits?
No clue - if openSUSE builds something transactional, then those 'zypper this' habits might become 'transactional-update this' and 'podman this' habits. If openSUSE builds a Desktop that is very flatpak centric, then those 'zypper this' habits might become 'flatpak this' (or picking nice stuff in GNOME Software's UI) habits If openSUSE builds something old fashioned, the 'zypper this' habits would say And maybe someone will develop something entirely different I've got no idea until people answer the core question of my post..what do we want to build?
* As a packager, though admittedly not of any core packages, I know how to write basic rpm specfiles, am familiar with the OBS branch, fix, and submit methods, as well as other related stuff that I have learnt over the years (thanks for many gurus in the oS community, of course) that allow me to submit packages to Factory/Leap occasionally. Never built a flatpak in my life, always felt they were some upstream devs' way of getting around downstream distro packagers and shipping to users directly. What will I need to learn and do so that I can keep contributing packages — in whatever guise — when openSUSE ALP starts to take shape? What tooling is there currently or will be in the future to help my transition from an rpm packager to a flatpak (or related) one? Or, is the idea that every oS ALP distro shall come with some upstream Flathub repository subscribed to, making distro packaging, at least for non-core packages (e.g. some science packages like octave) unnecessary?
Again, I can't speculate about what you'll need to do different when I'm also not able to speculate about what openSUSE might decide to build atop of ALP. The door is wide open for openSUSE to define it's future, I think people need to think more about _what_ that needs to look like. We can figure out the _how_ as we do it. -- Richard Brown Distributions Architect SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, D-90461 Nuremberg, Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Managing Directors/Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Martje Boudien Moerman