openSUSE Linux User Group of Mauritius meets Luboš Kocman
We did not have physical meetups for perhaps longer than a year. So, when Luboš told me that he is visiting Mauritius and will be glad to meet local openSUSE, Linux & FOSS people, I was thrilled. Not to mention he'd bring some openSUSE goodies. 😊 I called up LUGM friends to make this happen.
We had a meetup in the conference room of Flying Dodo, Bagatelle, on Saturday 22 January 2022. Luboš Kocman, the Release Manager for openSUSE, who came to Mauritius on vacation was kind enough to spare a few hours and meet us.
Nirvan Pagooah, the Secretary of the Linux User Group of Mauritius, made the announcement of the meetup on the LUGM discussion list. Due to sanitary restrictions imposed by the government we could not make the meetup public. We had to keep it a private event with a limited number of attendees.
Luboš told us about some new things that will be coming to Leap in the future. He explained his role as a Release Manager for openSUSE and how the community as a whole is regarded as a SUSE partner. He explained the relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE community. He also talked about SUSE Liberty Linux, a new offering by SUSE which offers support for mixed Linux environment, like RHEL, CentOS and SLES.
Luboš showed us code.opensuse.org/leap/features/issues where community members can request the features they want most in openSUSE Leap. Hence, contributing to making openSUSE distributions better.
I asked whether the feature requests for Leap won't make it such that Leap and Tumbleweed will have different features. Luboš opened opensource.suse.com/legal/policy and explained that the contributions land in Factory first. He talked about the binary compatibility between Leap & SLES and users can test on Leap then migrate to SLES at total ease.
We talked about contributing to open source. Luboš mentioned non-code contributions and how easy it is to contribute to openSUSE. Ajay Ramjatan, one of the founders and the current President of LUGM, mentioned that for many years this is what he's been telling Linux & FOSS enthusiasts, that contributions can be in any form, like designs, translations, etc.
On that note Avinash Meetoo added that the Mauritian Creole (kreol morisien) can be an interesting FOSS project if we would consider adding Kreol support to openSUSE. He mentioned that there are people who are well versed on the topic but might not be techie, that is where we can work together and make it happen.
Renghen Pajanilingum shot a few tech questions, from containers to programming languages & having to compile software using different versions of packages. I know Renghen does not like to spend time fixing the distro problems because he'd rather spend that on actual work. However, he is one of the several Linux people that I have tried to lure to the green side. 😁 Not there yet but I am hopeful that we'll paint his laptop green one day.
I cannot end this blog without thanking Joffrey Michaïe for sponsoring a round of beer 🍺 (and other drinks) for everyone.
At around 5 p.m the meetup ended.
Some of us stayed at Flying Dodo for more beer and to have dinner. Finally, we went to Mugg & Bean for a coffee and continued chatting about work, life and the balance. At 8:30 p.m, the hotel's taxi came for Luboš.
Hoping to be able to meet and greet geekos again.