On 2011-04-08 Sebastian wrote:

Hi *, Jos,

On Monday, April 04, 2011 18:07:16 Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

I've received a few requests already from ppl asking "what will the next openSUSE release bring". Now I know a few things being worked on, from Webpin2 to the bretzn/appstream stuff. And of course the obvious "latest software packages". But I guess there are other ideas people would like to work on, right?

Quite. :)

We (open-slx) are doing a Plasma Active device-independent user experience, based on openSUSE and Plasma. I've just blogged about Plasma Active, as many of you won't have heard of it yet: http://vizzzion.org/blog/2011/04/plasma- active-a-desirable-user-experience-encompassing-the-device-spectrum/ There's more information on communitybase: http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active

.. and a video for the impatient: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GAFfjscVyg

In all due modesty, I've an insanely great openSUSE in my hands, running on a tablet computer. :) We're working on it on the opensuse-kde list, and on the active@kde.org list, packages have been developed in the OBS, and the sources are upstream at KDE's Git. There are 11.4-based packages and a live iso. The status is "boots and kinda works", lots of showstoppers. We're targeting our first stable release end of Sept.

I understand that non-desktop or -server stuff may not be everybody's cup of tea, but those who would like to lend a hand on making openSUSE rock on all kinds of new devices are very welcome to do so. (See http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Tasks for some inspiration.)

Plasma Active is also quite different in its approach to the upstream/downstream: we're a cross-stack, multi-disciplined team (designers, hackers, testers, packagers, ...), working across borders dedicated to create a desirable user experience.

As to marketing and communication, please do not overhype this thing at this point. Those that can be of value to our mission should surely know. We've worked out a communication strategy in the Plasma Active team, so if you're planning to do any substantial PR around it right now, I'd much prefer if we first concentrate on making it really rock, and above all that we coordinate it.

Abse-fracking-lutely cool. I've seen some stuff about it on planet KDE already and mentioned this in a column I wrote for linuxuser (UK magazine). It'll end up on the wiki page ;-) At what point do you think this warrants an article for news.o.o?

Cheers,