Why there are no openSUSE based distros?

bbsmitho · September 9, 2008, 3:57pm

There are distros based on Fedora, Red Hat, Ubuntu. Well these are the major ones and there are many others distros which are based on other distros. My question is why there is not a single distro based on openSUSE? OpenSUSE does not lack anything and is not behind at all from any other distro. Its very polished distro and successful but I am very surprised to find that there is no distro based on openSUSE. What do you think is the reason?

BoloMarkIII · September 9, 2008, 4:18pm

There are 2 that I can think of, JackLab Suse & Educational Suse.

Chrysantine · September 9, 2008, 5:13pm

Thank goodness there isn’t - the landscape is already too fragmented as it is.

davidgurvich · September 9, 2008, 5:37pm

Try installing a minimal base install of OpenSuSE. I doubt you will be able to come close to damnsmalllinux 50MB livecd/liveusb. That includes an x-server, configuration tools, web browser, office suite, and other software. There is also Knoppix, a Debian derivative known for it’s hardware compatibility, and Ubuntu itself.

There are many distros based on Debian. The reason is that it is trivial to configure a good small base upon which to build. I think my install of OpenSuSE/KDE4 is upwards of 5GB.

buckesfeld · September 9, 2008, 8:58pm

On 09/09/2008 Chrysantine wrote:
> Thank goodness there isn’t - the landscape is already too fragmented
> as it is.

I remember a Novell Brainshare session held by Andreas Girardet about “How to build your own distro” <G>

Uwe

john_hudson · September 9, 2008, 9:12pm

One reason is that openSUSE already includes many of the options that are served by derivative distros. No need for a Kubuntu equivalent because you can choose Gnome or KDE at installation.

Similarly the patterns offered by YaST cover some of the options that come as separate derivatives of other distros.

Also with the Build Service, it is much easier to assemble your own tailor made distro. So less need for less experienced users to rely on someone else to do it for them.

Spyhawk · September 11, 2008, 1:21pm

There is some “small” openSUSE fork : Caixa Magica and Astaro. There were also a Sun drived openSUSE based distro : Sun JDS, but this one existed before the launch of openSolaris and is no more developped afaik.

More on this “distro tree” : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Gldt.svg

chef_d · September 11, 2008, 5:15pm

Hmm you ask a good question.
Perhaps its because openSuSe is perfect already

einheit47 · September 11, 2008, 6:14pm

Perhaps because for a while some distinctive parts of SuSE, like yast, were not under the GPL? Why create a derivative of SuSE without yast?

davidgurvich · October 28, 2008, 3:56am

That seems a valid point. There have been other parts that were not available, AppArmor comes to mind.

premamotion · January 21, 2011, 11:34pm

Thank God that there arent a 1000 variations of the same distro, like happened for Ubuntu... 1000 variations of a color... thats no need… openSUSE 11.4 for me is the best, its not perfect (there is no perfection...yet), but its the best out there! It`s something else than the rest…

consused · January 21, 2011, 11:56pm

“The revive of an old 45” (ancient multimedia soundbite). I agree with post #3 from Chrysantine. We don’t need more fragmentation. Imitation is a form of flattery - I here you say. However, I would rather have the original creation + updates.

premamotion · January 22, 2011, 12:01am

Bravo! I perfectly agree!

brunomcl · January 22, 2011, 7:26am

I find it hard to think of something that opensuse doesn’t already have, and well implemented at that. So why derive?

The 4GB packages + patterns cover many of the would be derivatives - server, minimum, gnome desktop, kde desktop, light desktops, even text desktop - ncurses yast is simply great, I feel right at home with it.

Theres also OBS and webpin.

There’s a lot to be said for opensuse.

malcolmlewis · January 22, 2011, 7:49am

Don’t forget SuSE Studio, now they have preload iso images, plug it in
and it installs… Just setting up LXDE on a Celeron 677 with 256MB of
RAM and a NVidia FX5200 with the proprietary driver, rocks along very
nicely so far for a machine that’s around 9 years old…

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.32.27-0.2-default
up 3 days 16:10, 2 users, load average: 0.07, 0.05, 0.02
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - Driver Version: 260.19.29

stamostolias · January 22, 2011, 1:57pm

In Hellas our community prepare to produce the greek opensuse distros.

brad455 · January 22, 2011, 2:36pm

Oh but there is a disto base on openSUSE and just look at what it’s for the thing every one needs now days with all these leaks coming out.

Here it is NetSecL and it was made with openSUSE Studio.

stamostolias · January 22, 2011, 2:48pm

It like gnome.

DenverD · January 22, 2011, 5:54pm

stamostolias wrote:
> In Hellas our community prepare to produce the greek opensuse distros.

WAIT!

did i miss something?

there is one openSUSE distributions with many many different languages
supported though translations of the (for example) menu items, notes,
documentation, help files, etc etc etc…

are those things now available for (for example) English, German,
Russian, Chinese, Polish, French, etc etc etc but not for Greek folks???

–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [posted via NNTP w/openSUSE 10.3]
Be it ever so humble, there is no place like 127.0.0.1.

stamostolias · January 22, 2011, 6:29pm

See this Petite Linux - Less is More