openSUSE Release Team to Share Results from arm Survey in Online Meetup
1. Dec 2020 | Douglas DeMaio | CC-BY-SA-3.0
Members of the openSUSE release team members will share results of openSUSE on arm during two separate online sessions on openSUSE’s Jisti instance Dec. 2.
The first session will be at 10:00 UTC and the second session at 16:00 UTC. Both sessions are expected to cover the same content and reach different time zones globally for those interested in attending.
Overall, there were almost 300 responses submitted. The core team to develop the survey wants to use the results as a baseline for future surveys about arm to help gauge trends about development efforts with openSUSE on arm architecture.
The results did offer some telling answers about the majority of openSUSE use on arm. More than 4 out of 5 responses indicated they used AArch64, Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi 4, PinePhone and/or Pine64.
The most favored distribution was almost evenly split between openSUSE Tumbleweed and openSUSE Leap. Of those using openSUSE Leap, almost half stated they used Leap for the stability. Almost half also indicated they would be willing to migrate from Leap to openSUSE Tumbleweed if it was as good enough.
A majority of responses indicated they were using ARMv6, ARMv7, or ARMv8 less than a year.
The developers discussed the results today and made some interpretations from the data. One conclusion is that some people might not be aware that openSUSE Tumbleweed has AArch64 images on software.opensuse.org and that some video packages were important to be included in the images. Additionally, there were multiple comments about sound drivers for the Raspberry Pi 4 had not backported to Leap 15.2 and Tumbleweed, but those drivers are expected to arrive the 5.10 kernel, which is the current version of the Linux Kernel mainline.
The intent of the survey was to better understand the arm user base and to determine a path or ARMv7.
The release team wants to share the results about what they learned on the openSUSE Jisti meetup Dec. 2 at 10:00 UTC and at 16:00 UTC. Each session is scheduled for an hour.