Two days ago the KDE Plasma community announced that they are providing a live image of the Plasma Netbook Reference Platform. They provide this image to make it easy for all interested developers, users, journalists and geeks to check it out, work with, talk about and and improve it. The reference image is the result of an KDE effort utilizing the openSUSE Buildservice and it’s based on the openSUSE distribution.
What does that mean for us the openSUSE community? First of all it makes us very happy and proud. And we think it proves once again that the openSUSE projects’ distribution and its tools have the level where they stand the production pressure which comes with this kind of use cases. The Plasma Netbook Reference Edition is a lot of code to build and has many potential contributors, testers and users. Enabling people to fullfil these jobs can not be done with some script found lying around on the internet. It requires a high level of experience, professionality and stability in development and operation of the toolchain. We always have these factors in mind and many hands and brains produce high quality products reproduceably. We have the build engine, the collaboration tools, notification systems, download infrastructure and the distribution on this level. For the KDE Plasma Netbook Reference Edition we can provide the tools to build the packages and the distribution image plus the linux distribution neccessary to test the interactions between the UI and the rest of the hardware on a netbook system. That way people can experience a whole system, which is way more useful than testing the UI in isolation.
But what is most important, many people in the community are around who wholeheartedly work on achieving these great results while having fun. Again, we are proud that the team selected our distribution as a base and our tools to work with. Thank you guys for your trust. It is a great move for all, the users, KDE and openSUSE.
