Dear s390x Team, I want to say "Thank you to all of you!" We have achieved a lot this year. We had our first Leap release. We have enabled a lot of new packages for s390x. We have contributed 2 times to hackathons of the Open source Day (by the Grace Hopper Celebration) and received new team members on this way. That all would not have been possible without you. Additionally, I want to congratulate Peace on the successfully passed Cloud Native Nanodegree. Then I will give my colleague Holger an overview of our Release Engineering process between the years. He is interested in the Release Engineering role for PowerPC, which is empty at the moment. If he is allowed to do that as part of his Consulting job, I want to integrate this topic into our bi-weekly meetings of the s390x team. This role was a one-man show (from IBM-side) in the past. You can work better and receive a better introduction in a team. So we will work as a team specializing in IBM technologies. Then we have founded the Linux Distributions Working Group [0] together with other community distributions via the Open Mainframe Project. Our Kick-off meeting will be on the 10th January 2022 [1]. I hope that we can improve the behaviour with the collaboration together with IBM and the support with that. The focus is on community distributions at the moment. But I believe, that we can open it to all distributions, who are feeling to be affected by such behaviour in the future. I have got a special Christmas present for you all as s390x users. :-) I have enabled snapd for s390x (and again for PowerPC). You can install it with the following commands on openSUSE Tumbleweed: sudo zypper addrepo --refresh https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/system:/snappy/openSUSE_Factory_z... snappy sudo zypper --gpg-auto-import-keys refresh sudo zypper install snapd source /etc/profile #or relogin sudo systemctl enable --now snapd sudo systemctl enable snapd.apparmor.service We have got 860 additional software packages for s390x available now. I have added the list. I hoped to make .Net 6 for IBM Z [2] as a Christmas present on this way available for you. But that has been only available for the other architectures as arm and amd64 [3]. The alternative installation script by Microsoft is indicating s390x as x86 with the 64bit architecture. Therefore, the wrong tar archive will be installed. If they do not provide a tar archive for s390x after my bug report, I will use our former Open Source Day Mentees (5 Microsoft employees) to bring it forward. Anyway, have a lot of fun experimenting with these new available packages via snap. :-) I had used snap as a Student for using the zoom client on openSUSE as an example (required for university lessons during Covid). That was not available in our openSUSE repositories. I wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy new year! Best regards, Sarah [0] https://wiki.openmainframeproject.org/display/LinuxDistrosWG/Linux+Distributions+Working+Group?desktop=true¯oName=contributors [1] https://lists.openmainframeproject.org/g/wg-linux-distros/message/8 [2] https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-linuxone/blogs/elizabeth-k... [3] https://snapcraft.io/dotnet-sdk