openSUSE openSUSE Conference 2025

The openSUSE Conference 2025, was held from 26 - 28 June at the vibrant Z-Bau, House of Contemporary Culture, Nuremberg, Germany. I had the pleasure of attending with my colleagues Eddy Lareine and Alex Bissessur. It marked my third time attending and speaking at the openSUSE Conference in Germany, and my fifth international openSUSE talk, after the Africa Internet Summit 2019 in Kampala, Uganda and the openSUSE Asia Summit 2019 in Bali, Indonesia.

My First Conference as a Board Member

Earlier this year, I was elected to the openSUSE Board, making this year's conference a little different, with added responsibilities.

Two days before the conference began, the Board held our face-to-face meetings. We voted on a few pending items and prepared for the Board's public session with the community, which was scheduled for Friday, 27 June at 6 p.m. These pre-conference meetings were insightful, especially for me as a new Board Member. I learned a great deal from more seasoned members like Simon Lees, Shawn Dunn, and our Chair Gerlald Pfeifer. I also benefitted from the perspectives of former Board Members Douglas DeMaio and Patrick Fitzgerald, who also joined the sessions. Although Jeff Mahoney and I started our mandates at the same time, his experience and understanding of how SUSE and openSUSE intersect brought invaluable context to many of the discussions.

Swag at the conference

One of my proposals as a Board Member was to set up an openSUSE Shop at the conference venue. This initiative allowed attendees, especially those visiting from outside Europe, to purchase openSUSE swag such as t-shirts, caps, tote bags, and mugs. For many of us from regions like Africa or islands like Mauritius, international shipping fees often exceed the actual item costs. This shop helped address that.

Thankfully, Eddy and Alex volunteered to help run the shop, so we didn't need to recruit more volunteers. However, managing the swag table while attending sessions was no easy feat. We had to take turns so we could still attend the talks we were interested in and present our own sessions (Alex and I each had two talks spread across different days).

Day 1 — Keynotes, Community Energy and Technical Deep Dives

The conference opened with a keynote address by SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen. He spoke from the heart, about his roots as an engineer, his passion for coding, and his belief in the power of community. He reminded us of how openSUSE reached its 20-year milestone, highlighting major contributions like YaST, KDE integration, and the Open Build Service (OBS), the latter being adopted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation for running Kubernetes builds.

Proprietary software development does not get you anywhere, it has to be open.
— Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen

That statement received a resounding applause.

Next up was Rick Spencer, SUSE General Manager, who emphasized that openSUSE is not just a collection of distros, but a single project with a unified purpose. He encouraged contributors to see beyond labels like Tumbleweed or Leap, and instead, embrace a collaborative spirit. His closing call-to-action was simple but powerful:

Join the momentum, every contribution matters.
— Rick Spencer

Later that day, I also attended Cathy Hu's talk on "SELinux — current state in (open)SUSE" while keeping an eye on the shop. As the maintainer of openSUSE's SELinux policy and userspace toolchain, Cathy gave a thorough overview of security improvements in the distro.

The second keynote was delivered by Peer Heinlein, CEO of the Heinlein Group. He talked about the risks of relying on proprietary software, referencing the fate of ownCloud after its acquisition by Kiteworks. In response, the Heinlein Group forked the open-source ownCloud Infinite Scale (OCIS) codebase to launch OpenCloud.

Midway through his talk, I had a déjà vu moment as his name sounded familiar. That's when I remembered that Peer Heinlein is the author of the book Dovecot: POP3/IMAP Servers for Enterprises and ISPs, a crucial reference when I built the email infrastructure for La Sentinelle five years ago.

After his talk, I introduced myself, shared how his book helped me, and thanked him in person. I took a selfie with him and Richard brown, the former openSUSE Board Chair who was always pushed me to be more involved in the project.

I attended the session on Leap 16.0 Beta, by Luboš Kocman, during which he unveiled the new Leap wallpaper.

We were very happy to see the green lizard on the wallpaper, a photo taken by our dear friend and fellow Mauritian, Arwin Neil Baichoo and submitted for the Leap 16.0 and Tumbleweed wallpaper collection. He made us proud. 😊

Day 2 — Talks on Community, Infrastructure, and the African Context

I delivered my first talk in the "Gallerie" room titled "2 cents on improving openSUSE Membership (Management)".

I presented my thoughts on how we could improve the membership process through a custom Laravel-based platform. I had a productive follow-up discussion afterward.

Later, Alex have his talk on "Geographically Distributed Kubernetes Clusters", highlighting the challenges cloud enthusiasts face in Mauritius, where GCP, AwS, and Azure are absent.

He described how unreliable power and lack of local cloud services inspired him and friends to build a distributed Kubernetes cluster to host their own blogs and applications.

My second talk, "Building openSUSE Mirror(s) in Mauritius", took place at 4 p.m. in the main hall. It was a status update on the mirror infrastructure project I began in 2022.

I shared lessons learned, improvements to sync strategies, and announced that Kaldera is sponsoring a second mirror in Mauritius, soon to be the fourth mirror in Africa.

The day concluded with the openSUSE Board Q&A session at 6 p.m. Gerald opened with a summary of proposed updates to election and membership rules, and I expanded on our membership platform. Jeff, Simon, and Shawn addressed governance structure proposals. The session felt productive, open, and reflective of the community's spirit.

Day 3 — Bring openSUSE swag for folks back home

On the final day, Alex gave his second talk, "Production-Ready Virtualisation with Harvester and Longhorn." He addressed how recent changes in pricing/licensing by a major virtualization vendor created uncertainty, especially in Africa. Thus, prompting many took seek alternatives.

Harvester and Longhorn, being open-source, hyperconverged solutions, offer a practical alternative at a time when cloud-native infrastructure is becoming the default.

At the end of day, as we were wrapping up, Doug said that we had a few conference t-shirts left and if I would like to bring back home some of them. Naturally, I agreed as I know friends back home would love that.

In fact, I distributed the t-shirts during my talk about the openSUSE Project at the Developers Conference 2025 (Mauritius), which happened just a few weeks after the openSUSE Conference.

Wrapping Up

This year's conference was memorable for many reasons, my new role on the Board, the warm community spirit, the brilliant talks, and of course, the friendships and collaborations that deepened along the way. Videos from all the sessions at oSC25 are available on YouTube.

A big thanks to everyone who made the openSUSE Conference 2025 a success.

Looking forward to seeing you all again in 2026!