People of openSUSE: Sébastien Poher

[caption id=”attachment_21578” align=”alignright” width=”300”] Sébastien Poher aka sogal[/caption]

About me

I’m 1.80m, I love to wear unreadable thrash metal bands t-shirts and prefer beer over wine (or any sort of drinks really).

My Beginnings

The first computer I ever touched was an Apple II. I remember spending hours playing this one game on a 5 1/2” floppy disk where I had to drive, via a clunky joystick, a spaceship through the abysses of an asteroid, killing monsters around.

I got into Linux in two steps, first, in 2007 but I was the only one among my friends to use it so I ended up sticking to the shitty OS I had. My next re-discovery of Linux was later in 2012 when I started professional training in system administration.

Why openSUSE

I tried many Linux and BSD distributions but always got frustrated after a while. Leap offered me the exact perfect balance I was looking for between stability, reliability and relative freshness of packages.

My first contribution

I wanted to have an up-to-date package of Tilix (a tiling terminal emulator) so I worked on it; this made me discover the Open Build Service (OBS), which is such a wonderful tool, but above all, I found it easy to contribute. I think that one strength of the openSUSE Project is that the step someone would need to make to start contributing is a really small one.

About the community

I am a bit of a misanthropist so seeing that people from different origins, that do not necessarily know each other, are able to work together in a constructive, peaceful and funny way provides me a good dose of hope!

What I do in the realm of openSUSE

I maintain a small set of packages. It’s fun to do and it makes me learn a lot about the process of creation and all the clockwork behind a distribution. However, the highlight of my openSUSE activities is my involvement in the French openSUSE community through an association called Alionet. We do our best to relay openSUSE’s news and documentation in French (yeah, French people are terrible at English).

Challenges that faces openSUSE

The lack of volunteers among the users community -at least around me- tends to be a real problem. It is hard to get people involved “on the field” and keep them motivated.

openSUSE needs…

A periodic communication targeted for end users. I am glad to see this “People of openSUSE” project being revived, I would be happy to see the same thing happening with short articles about different software available in openSUSE or tips and tricks related to Leap, Tumbleweed or other openSUSE projects. Maybe by the end of the year or next year I will have more time to make this happens.

Me beyond openSUSE

I learn to play drums. It is kinda hard yet funny to see that, at first, my body does not obey my brain but after a while they manage to work together and create a nice rhythm.

My Computer setup

I have a Thinkpad T450 running Leap 15.1 with GNOME. The apps I use the most are Evolution, Firefox, Tilix and Cherrytree.