openSUSE Community Publishes Annual Survey Results

The openSUSE community has published results from the annual community survey.

This year’s results increased from last year’s results by more than 100 participants, with 1,320 respondents this time around. While participation increased, results indicated a larger amount of people located in Europe took the survey. Since other regions were less represented, people should be aware of this fact while reading the results.

Information was gathered about the project, its distributions, the demographics and how the community is contributing to the project. A number of questions in this year’s survey provided participants with a wider opportunity to express their opinions and satisfaction with the above topics. A document lists all the comments from the survey.

Some modifications were made from the previous year’s survey, but the highest percentage group of users were ages of 35 to 44. An overwhelming survey participants were from the Northern Hemisphere and almost 500 were in the +1 UTC time zone before the recent daily savings, which put most in the Central European Time. Almost 60 percent of surveyees had a university degree and more than 81 percent of those who answered the question had at least a graduate degree. The amount of surveyees with a job in IT is about split about 50/50.

A core take away from the survey was that openSUSE distros were well supported for IT professionals and developers. Technologies for professional content creators appears to be growing is usage, according to the results.

More than 40 percent have been using Unix-like operating systems for 10 years and less than 3 percent have been using one less than a year. A majority of openSUSE’s desktop users favored using Tumbleweed and those favoring server use opted for Leap. MicroOS use on servers increase more than 40 percent. Packagers were given much recognition in the survey. An overwhelming percentage of surveyees ranked official repositories as their favorite source for get software; the others that followed were rpm downloads along with Flatpak, AppImages and snap respectively.

The survey results showed that most would recommend openSUSE distributions to advanced users and least recommend the distributions for new users. The overall sense was that users were satisfied with the distributions and found them stable and reliable; the distributions and there ease of use were held in high regard, especially the core uses of the server with web hosting, databases, containers and virtualization.

A majority of people prefered openSUSE’s forums, reddit and Twitter for technical communication and knowledge sharing about openSUSE. The other platforms were used for more social interaction with the community.

For more details about the annual survey, please visit the results on the openSUSE Wiki.