openSUSE Leap 16.0 is now available as a public image on Google Cloud Platform. Both x86_64 and Arm64 images were built on 16 February 2026 and are ready for use with Compute Engine instances.

Launching an instance with openSUSE Leap 16.0

Getting started with Leap 16.0 on GCP is straightforward. From the Google Cloud Console, navigate to Compute Engine > VM instances and click Create Instance.

In the instance configuration page, scroll down to the OS and storage section and click Change to open the boot disk configuration panel.

Under the Public images tab, select openSUSE from the Operating system dropdown. You will then see openSUSE Leap listed under the Version dropdown — select the openSUSE Leap 16.0 entry. Choose your preferred boot disk type and size, then click Select to confirm.

From there, configure the rest of your instance settings — machine type, networking, firewall rules — as you normally would, and click Create to launch your new Leap 16.0 VM.

A note on Google Cloud Observability

During instance creation, you will notice the Observability - Ops Agent section near the bottom of the configuration page. For supported operating systems, this provides a convenient Install Ops Agent for Monitoring and Logging checkbox that automatically installs the agent when the VM boots. However, with openSUSE Leap 16.0 selected as the boot disk image, this checkbox is greyed out and displays the message: "Not available for the selected image." This is because the automated installation method does not yet support Leap 16.0.

You might think the next step would be to install the Ops Agent manually via the command line. Google's installation documentation provides a script for exactly this:

curl -sSO https://dl.google.com/cloudagents/add-google-cloud-ops-agent-repo.sh
sudo bash add-google-cloud-ops-agent-repo.sh --also-install

Unfortunately, this does not work on Leap 16.0 either — and the reason is buried in how the script identifies your operating system.

Why does the script fail?

The script reads /etc/os-release to determine the OS family and version. For any SUSE-based distribution, including openSUSE Leap, it routes to a handle_suse function via a case statement in main():

sles|opensuse-leap) handle_suse ;;

Inside handle_suse, the add_repo() function extracts the major version number and constructs a SLES-based repository codename:

local SUSE_VERSION=${VERSION_ID%%.*}
local CODENAME="${REPO_CODENAME:-"sles${SUSE_VERSION}"}"

On openSUSE Leap 16.0, VERSION_ID is 16.0, so SUSE_VERSION resolves to 16 and the codename becomes sles16. The script then attempts to add a repository at:

https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/repos/google-cloud-ops-agent-sles16-$basearch-all

The problem is that this repository simply does not exist. Google currently publishes Ops Agent packages for sles12 and sles15, but there is no sles16 repository — SLES 16 itself has not been released yet. The script makes no distinction between SLES and openSUSE Leap; it treats both as the same platform and derives the repo path purely from the major version number. The result is a refresh_failed error telling you to check your network connectivity and verify that you are running a supported distribution.

This leaves openSUSE Leap users on GCP in a bit of a gap. While the Ops Agent officially supports Leap 15.6, that image is no longer available on GCP — only Leap 16.0 is offered as a public image. So the supported version cannot be deployed, and the deployable version is not supported. Until Google publishes a compatible repository for Leap 16.0, there is no straightforward path to running the Ops Agent on an openSUSE instance on GCP. Keep an eye on the Ops Agent supported platforms list for updates.

Installing the Leap 15.6 version of the agent isn't a viable workaround due to missing libraries.

Problem: 1: nothing provides 'libcrypto.so.1.1()(64bit)' needed by the to be installed google-cloud-ops-agent-2.63.0-1.sles15.x86_64

As always, the openSUSE community welcomes feedback and bug reports — if you run into issues with the GCP images that are specific to the openSUSE project, report them through the openSUSE Bugzilla.

Two seats on the openSUSE Board are up for grabs as Simon Lees and Shawn W Dunn complete their mandate. This is a great opportunity for community members who want to help shape the direction of the openSUSE Project.

Key dates

• 27 February – Deadline for candidates to declare their intention
• 28 February – Candidate slate published
• 1 March – Voting opens
• 9 March – Results announced (ballots remain open for one week)

Who can participate?

Only active openSUSE members are eligible to vote. If you're a contributor but not yet a member, you can apply for membership at any time. Members who join after the candidate slate is published on 28 February can still vote, but will not be able to run as a candidate.

If your membership is approved after voting has begun, reach out to the election officials to inform them. Membership approval and voting in the election is not an automatic process. The election officials will use an up to data membership database for the election process on the 1 March when opening the ballots. Thus, membership approvals after that date have to be informed to the officials.

Details on how to become a member are available on the wiki: openSUSE:Members

Get involved

If you're interested in running, reach out to the Election Committee via their mailing list before the 27th of February. The announcement was made on the openSUSE Project mailing list and social media, and the election wiki page has been updated with full details.

The openSUSE Board plays a vital role in guiding the project. Whether you choose to run or simply cast your vote, your participation matters.

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 has 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 gave 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 his 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 to 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!

Install the RPM

sudo rpm -Uvh mysql80-community-release-sles12-8.noarch.rpm

Import the MySQL GnuPG Key

sudo rpm --import /etc/RPM-GPG-KEY-mysql

Install MySQL with Zypper

sudo zypper install mysql-community-server

A superuser account 'root'@'localhost' is created. A password for the superuser is set and stored in the error log file. To reveal it, use the following command:

sudo grep 'temporary password' /var/log/mysql/mysqld.log

Change the root password as soon as possible by logging in with the generated, temporary password and set a custom password for the superuser account:

mysql -u root -p

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'MyNewPassword';

In the early hours of Friday 16 December the results were computed and emailed to all voters. The results were also publicly announced on the project's mailing list.

There were 544 eligible voters in the election and 218 voters have cast their votes.

Results

Thus, the elected Board members are:

1. Gertjan Lettink
2. Douglas Demaio
3. Neal Gompa

I wish the (re)-elected candidates good luck ahead and thank all the other candidates who stepped up for this election.

• Douglas Demaio
• Patrick Fitzgerald
• Nathan Wolf
• Neal Gompa
• Chuck Payne
• Gertjan Lettink

openSUSE members can also ask questions to the candidates on the project mailing list. Vojtěch Zeisek asked the candidates about their plans and what they want to achieve with the project.

Douglas had an interesting answer. He stated that he would like to see that the openSUSE Project adopts the blockchain technology. He cited the election as an example where a smart contract could facilitate the task of running elections and maintaining an updated members list based on whether members' tokens have been used in (x) number of years.

He also mentioned NFT as something that could be explored to create a sort of badge system like the Fedora project has and member contributions could be rewarded with NFTs.

On the question about what he wishes to do, he answered that he would focus on getting the project either becoming a Foundation or transition to a decentralised autonomous organisation. Discussions about creating an openSUSE Foundation started in 2019 but it hasn't progressed much since.

I will write more about the candidates Q&A with members as they happen. If you would like to ask a question or follow the discussions, then feel free to subscribe to the project's mailing list.

I was invited to speak at the event and I chose to explain a little about openSUSE, its different distributions and how we have managed to set up two mirrors to improve the performance of openSUSE updates in Mauritius.

Girish is a representative for OSCA Mauritius and he works at OceanDBA. He put all the effort into organising this event. At about 09h30, the conference room at Flying Dodo was almost full. Girish welcomed everyone and introduced the presentation themes for the day.

First presentation – Linux Kernel history by Chittesh Sham

Chittesh is a DevOps Engineer at Corel Corporation. He did a presentation on the Linux Kernel. He tried to summarise three decades of Linux history in one presentation. It was a very informative and fun prez.

Second presentation – Bash Scripting by Shravan Dwarka

Shravan is a Linux System Engineer at OceanDBA. He did a presentation on the Bourne Again SHell (Bash).

After explaining about Shells, Shravan gave a scenario where a database administrator had to automate backups and perform backup retention.

He then explained line by line how he wrote a Bash script to execute the backup.

Final presentation – openSUSE Mirrors in Mauritius

My presentation was last. It's been a while since I set up two openSUSE mirrors in Mauritius. Any openSUSE user on the island will now benefit from fast updates without having to configure anything on their openSUSE machine.

This event was an opportunity to make a public announcement about the mirrors and explain the process behind. That is, how I contacted sponsors for server/bandwidth in Mauritius and got in touch with the openSUSE Heroes to build the repo mirrors.

However, first I did a history lesson about S.u.S.E, SUSE and openSUSE. I clarified that openSUSE is a project and the various distributions have names like Leap, Leap Micro, Tumbleweed and MicroOS.

Then, I showed the tickets that I opened at openSUSE to get the ball rolling. Within a few days we had the mirrors set up.

I mentioned that the domain opensuse.mu is sponsored by the openSUSE project itself. Then, the Heroes created the records to point the domain & sub-domains to servers in Mauritius, sponsored by cloud.mu and Rogers Capital Technology Services.

While speaking about the mirrors, I explained how MirrorBrain works. It is an open source framework to run a content delivery network for mirror servers. The two openSUSE mirrors in Mauritius are mirror.opensuse.mu and mirror.rcts.opensuse.mu. To show how MirrorBrain works with these two servers, I opened get.opensuse.org to download the latest release of openSUSE Leap 15.4.

I selected the offline installation image and we checked the URL from which the image was downloading. It was the Rogers Capital Technology Services (RCTS) mirror server.

I SSH'ed on the cloud.mu mirror server to show how the rsync is done from the restricted rsync server of openSUSE.org. I did not SSH on the RCTS server because it requires a VPN (RCTS engineers take security very seriously 🤓). My VPN setup was on a different machine than the one I was doing my presentation on.

I explained the difference between rsync.opensuse.org and stage.opensuse.org, the former being a public rsync server. It can be used by anyone wishing to run a private openSUSE mirror for home or office use.

The conference room was packed with attendees which is a promising thing for an open source event.

At the end of the event, Joffrey Michaïe, the founder and CEO of OceanDBA addressed the attendees. He thanked the wonderful audience for showing up to the event. Joffrey explained that OceanDBA's business is built on open source technologies and that they have the open source philosophy at the heart of the company.

He was glad to see a lot of young folks attending the event and said that his company would be keen to sponsor such events again in the future. He mentioned that at the moment there are about fifteen open positions at OceanDBA and anyone wishing to apply could reach out to him directly or talk to any other personnel of the company.

The Managing Director of Rogers Capital Technology Services, Dev Hurkoo, and the Roshan Patroo, Manager at RCTS, attended the event. We met after my presentation. They both told me that they were impressed by the attendee turn-out for an open source event. Dev expressed his interest to support open source activities in the future too.

Leap is binary compatible with SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) as it shares the same source. Therefore, you can switch a Leap instance to SLE and benefit from paid support without any hassle. This comes very handy in environments where you build and test on Leap but deploy on SLE — lift & shift can't be any simpler.

Leap 15.4 is a minor release but coinciding with this release, the openSUSE Project introduced a new version of Leap designed for containers and virtualised workloads. It's called Leap Micro. The current version is 5.2.

Leap Micro shares same source as SLE Micro.

In order to celebrate this release, we organised a virtual openSUSE Beer Party in Mauritius.

Hello everyone! The openSUSE Mauritius community will host a virtual #openSUSE Beer Party TODAY 16h30 — 19h00 to celebrate the Leap 15.4 release. They will do a Leap 15.4 installation live and talk about the openSUSE local mirror. Here is the link to join: https://t.co/D6DpmheC3D pic.twitter.com/SBxiXHrwGA— MSCC (@MSCraftsman) June 10, 2022 Embedded JavaScript

The virtual party was held using the Jitsi Meet platform provided by MIXP. Since it's hosted locally, we expected a smooth quality in video and audio.

Chittesh & Aditya joined the call early on.‌

We're at https://t.co/6oTYOsRycW doing an #openSUSE Leap 15.4 installation & celebrating the recent release. 🍻🥳 pic.twitter.com/AxUuh18Mg1— Ish Sookun (@IshSookun) June 10, 2022 Embedded JavaScript

I had to juggle between doing a few things at home, handling the kid and getting back to call. Sandeep & Nirvan joined us too, and by the end, David joined the call, for the geek chat.

We installed Leap 15.4 in a VM. While chatting with Chittesh & Aditya, I selected the server profile from the installer instead of a GNOME Desktop. Facepalm!

After the installation, I installed patterns-gnome-gnome to have a full blown GNOME Desktop. Sandeep commented downloading of the packages appeared slow. Yes, indeed. So, here I manually switched the repo to mirror.opensuse.mu the ~700 packages downloaded in ~5 mins.

openSUSE Bar

A while later, I joined the openSUSE Bar at meet.opensuse.org/bar. It was nice to have a catch-up with Gertjan after a long time.

Earlier this year, when Luboš Kocman visited Mauritius, we spoke about it again.

Then, a few weeks ago, I heard from cloud.mu, who were willing to sponsor a server for mirror purposes. That was just perfect timing. I had started discussions with an ISP but then cloud.mu was not just willing to provide the server & bandwidth resources but their speed to deploy and assist was even more commendable.

Once the server was ready, the next step was to contact openSUSE admins to update the DNS records for opensuse.mu. I sent my request to the openSUSE Board for the purchase of the domain a long time ago. Until now I used to run a small blog for openSUSE tips & tutorials on opensuse.mu. The domain is owned by SUSE and mananged by the openSUSE admins, i.e the Heroes team.

After a few trials to sync from rsync.opensuse.org and other mirrors closer to Mauritius, I contacted the Heroes to get access to stage.opensuse.org,  the restricted rsync server of openSUSE. Then, it was a matter of a few days to sync all that content.

Finally, the openSUSE mirror for Mauritius was ready.

Compared to other regions, where there are several mirrors in the same country, the whole African continent had only two openSUSE mirrors until now. One managed by TENET (Tertiary Education and Research Network) in South Africa and the other one by Liquid Telecom in Kenya. Mauritius joins that list as the third mirror in the African region, thanks to cloud.mu.

How to switch to the openSUSE Mauritius mirror?

Switching to the Mauritian mirror is easy. First, remove the current repos that you have by either running zypper lr to identify them and zypper rr repo-name to remove the repos, or go to /etc/zypp/repos.d and remove the .repo files of the openSUSE repositories. If you have repos for other applications, e.g Google Chrome, VS Code etc, leave them.

Then, if you're using Leap, you can set up the Leap 15.3 OSS, Non-OSS and Update repositories.

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/distribution/leap/15.3/repo/oss openSUSE-Leap-OSS

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/distribution/leap/15.3/repo/non-oss openSUSE-Leap-Non-OSS

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/update/leap/15.3/oss openSUSE-Leap-Update-OSS

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/update/leap/15.3/non-oss openSUSE-Leap-Update-Non-OSS

If you're using Tumbleweed, add the following repositories.

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/tumbleweed/repo/oss openSUSE-Tumbleweed-OSS

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/tumbleweed/repo/non-oss openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Non-OSS

sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/update/tumbleweed openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Update-OSS

The mirror contains files for the x86_64 architecture only. If there is a need for other architectures, I'll do the necessary. Ping me on social media or send a mail to ishwon@opensuse.org.

One thing that I noticed was new in the installer is the icon to change the color theme during installation. This was not present when I tested the Leap 15.4 Alpha distribution.

On the top-right corner of the installer there is a moon icon which can be clicked to select a different theme for the installer. Five themes are available which contain three dark and two light variants.

The default theme is set to the installation.qss style sheet.

The cyan-black , highcontrast and white-black are dark themes while installation and style are light themes.

I took the above screenshots using the Leap 15.4 Beta image on VirtualBox to get clear images. In the Twitter thread I took pictures of the installation process and the theme selection on a laptop.

In either installation I did not encounter any bug while setting up GNOME Desktop with defaults.

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.

Both Attila Pinter and Maurizio Galli received good support from the community members. We had 542 eligible voters, out of which 147 voted in the election.

Attila Pinter received 122 votes in his favour which represents 83%, 22 votes against and 3 abstentions.

Maurizio Galli received 120 votes in his favour representing 82%, 21 votes against and 6 abstentions.

Congratulations to both of them! 👏 🎉

This election is required to fill two seats on the openSUSE Board, as the term for Simon Lees and Vinzenz Vietzke are coming to an end.

To learn more about openSUSE membership, check out this wiki.

As the initial nominations/applications phase ended, we had only two members who expressed to run for this election. They are:

• Attila Pinter
• Maurizio Galli

Since, we had only two candidates for two available seats, we extended the nominations/applications phase for another two weeks, giving other members the chance to toss the names of people who'd they wish to nominate. However, even after the two weeks, we were still left with only two candidates and therefore, as per the election rule about insufficient nominations, we started the election and each candidate is required to obtain 50% of votes to be considered a winner.

The ballots were opened on the 13th of December and openSUSE members received their voting URL/credentials by email. They can vote until the 30th of December at 23h59 UTC. Ballots will close on 31st December at midnight and a few hours later the result will be announced.