openSUSE is a free, open project. Although Novell sponsors it heavily, the project belongs to the openSUSE community. Things were not always this way; before Novell's acquisition of SuSE, SuSE internally managed the course of the distribution, with little input or participation from the user community.

To strengthen the openSUSE project we’re looking for an enthusiastic Chief Evangelist to: promote and spread the adoption of openSUSE; be a public face for the project on conferences and events; act as voice of the community back to Novell’s leadership team; develop and nurture the openSUSE communities; pro actively drive openSUSE marketing;

Novell's CTO Jeff Jaffe and Zonker (the symbol of OpenSUSE) say their last words before leaving Novell, replacements are imminent

SUSE Linux used to be a very KDE-centric distribution. Then Novell came around, bought SUSE and Ximian, and slowely but surely they turned the now-openSUSE distribution into effectively a GNOME-centric distribution with KDE as its sidekick. The openSUSE community, however, doesn't appear to be particularly happy with KDE being a sidekick.

THE developer of GNote [1-6], who has worked for Novell until recently, is moving to Fedora.

Another distribution to release recently is OpenSuSE 11.2. OpenSuSE serves as the base for Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. In some ways, it's to SuSE what Fedora is to Red Hat. But unlike Fedora, OpenSuSE doesn't live on the bleeding edge.

I’ve used SUSE Linux before, but that was way back in the day of version 9. Things have changed a lot since then, both with OpenSUSE (the open source incarnation of Novell’s SUSE Linux) and in the open source community as a whole.

openSUSE Community Week runs from May 11 through May 17. Our community week is a chance to get people from around the world together at the same time to focus on specific topics, and to transfer knowledge about openSUSE.

Next up, Novell will turn its SUSE Linux attention to enterprise developers, according to Novell Channel Chief John Dragoon