TuxRadar: At the moment, OpenSUSE has a longer release process than Ubuntu and Fedora - are you planning to change that?

Andreas Jaeger: We've just switched... In the last few years we had an irregular schedule, where we looked at the calendar and when certain things would be released. And every time we had a very long discussion of when to schedule it... Should we schedule four weeks before Christmas? No, that's bad, we're missing the new Gnome version, or the new KDE version, OpenOffice.org, whatever... Every time it was a long conversation.

So now we've decided to go for a strict eight month schedule.

TR: Always eight months?

AJ: Let's see how far it goes! [Laughs] We will have the release of 11.2 in November, and after that we start the eight month cycle. Let's hope that we can go through with it.

TR: What are your personal favourite features of 11.2 so far, as it develops?

AJ: I started Twittering a couple of months ago, and now we have a couple of social network clients in the distribution, like Gwibber. KDE is moving on with social networking too.

There's another thing I'm looking forward to, although it's after 11.2, and that's the web element of YAST [WebYAST].

TR: Like Webmin?

AJ: I haven't seen Webmin for some years, so I'm not sure, but last time I saw it it was using static HTML. WebYAST is AJAXy and so on. It's still in its infancy... We might use one or two of its modules in 11.2.

TR: So how has the response been to the choice of KDE as the default desktop selection in the installer?

AJ: There was a lot of discussion. Some people are glad about it, some people are disappointed. There are a lot of political things... People are getting a lot more religious about their desktop choice. More than about anything else. I haven't seen the same type of discussion about a default text editor - whether we have Vi or Emacs! [Laughs] But the desktop is something a lot of people care about.

On the other hand some people are new to a distribution. They come from Windows or Mac, and we've got to reach out to those people... they don't know. "What should I choose here?" You have to make a choice - in the installer it didn't really tell users about the desktops. You can't give justice to a project in a few sentences. You can't describe what a desktop is. That's why we pre-selected a desktop.

TR: Do you use KDE?

AJ: I have been using KDE, although for 11.2 I've switched to Gnome, to see the other side as well. On my laptop it's Gnome but on my workstation it's KDE.

TR: In the past we saw various SUSE respins like SLICK, but not so much thesedays, although with SUSE Studio that will change...

AJ: That will definitely change for sure. With 11.1 we changed the trademark policy. Before that we didn't have a proper trademark policy, so whatever you did you were in a very grey area. It wasn't clear if you could use our trademarks, and if so, how you could use them. We changed the license for 11.1 to encourage respins.

TR: So could we make OpenSUSE TuxRadar Edition? How much can we use the name?

AJ: You can use the name and the branding as long as you use the OpenSUSE packages. If you put your own kernel in, you can only say it's based on OpenSUSE.

TR: We've seen that Con Kolivas is back with a new kernel scheduler. He doesn't seem to want it in the mainline kernel... Could you see it in OpenSUSE some day?

AJ: I would want to get some more measurements. I think Jens Axboe was describing some way of benchmarking it... Create some disk I/O, make a DVD, and at the same time measure another activity to see how it performs. Instead of a subjective feeling that it's better, get some numbers to see. And if it's good, we have the OpenSUSE Build Service - anyone can take our kernel and apply a patch on top of it. But at the moment it's too experimental and unknown.