Uyuni Joins openSUSE Project Ahead of Annual Conference

There are moments in open-source history that feel less like announcements and more like finally saying out loud what everyone already knew.

Eight years ago, during the annual openSUSE conference, the story began on news.opensuse.org with the announcement that Spacewalk was being forked. Today, as we gear up for the openSUSE Conference 2026, that circle is finally closing.

We are delighted to share that the Uyuni Project has officially joined the openSUSE Project!

While our people have worked alongside each other since that initial fork, this formal integration marks a major milestone. It makes it easier for new contributors to find their way to Uyuni, gives the community a definitive home, and strengthens openSUSE’s tradition of bringing people together to build powerful, open-source tools that benefit the entire ecosystem.

A Partnership Years in the Making

To understand the significance of this homecoming, it helps to look back at the original fork.

By the mid-2010s, the original Spacewalk project (the foundation for Red Hat Satellite and SUSE Manager, which is now known as SUSE Multi-Linux Manager had reached a turning point. The upstream focus had shifted largely toward maintenance and stabilization. While the wider community remained highly engaged and continued submitting valuable code, many of those external contributions began to sit idle. When it was publicly announced that upstream code contributions would decrease and a call was made for other community members to step up and take over the management role, extensive discussions took place.

Ultimately, the community realized that a fork was necessary to inject new life and inspiration into the project. The goal was never just to maintain the status quo, but to build a collaborative space to innovate together-bringing in a modern React UI, container and Kubernetes integration, and utilizing Salt for configuration management.

To reflect this bold new direction, the project was named Uyuni, after the world’s largest salt flats in Bolivia. It was a nod to Salt, but more importantly, a massive statement of shared ambition.

Upstream First: A Community Without Second-Class Citizens

From the very beginning, Uyuni has been much more than just a codebase. It is a thriving, passionate community of system administrators, developers, and open-source enthusiasts dedicated to solving complex infrastructure challenges together.

While Uyuni serves as the upstream project for SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, its development thrives on a strict “upstream first” philosophy. Let’s be clear: Uyuni is not a stripped-down, feature-limited “free version” of an enterprise product. It is the fully-featured, cutting-edge foundation where every piece of innovation happens first. The project operates on the core principle that the community leads the way, ensuring that everyday contributors drive the project’s future. Everyone sits at the same table and there are no second-class citizens.

The heart of Uyuni is driven by the individuals who contribute code, squash bugs, translate documentation, and help answer each other’s questions in chat channels and forums. Over the years, this collaborative spirit has fostered strong relationships with developers across the open-source spectrum, sharing and receiving contributions with communities like Fedora, Alma Linux, and Rocky Linux.

As a configuration and infrastructure management tool, the code allows us to seamlessly deploy patches, manage configurations, and build containers. But it is the community that ensures the tool remains versatile; it supports a massive range of client systems including openSUSE flavors, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its derivatives), Ubuntu, Debian, Amazon Linux, AlmaLinux and more.

Constant Innovation: Uyuni 2026.04

The community’s hard work continues to shine in the most recent release, Uyuni 2026.04. This update brings even more power to the platform by adding full support for RHEL 10 and compatible distributions. It also introduces enhanced security auditing integration and features a brand-new reporting dashboard for Grafana, built by and for the people who use it every day.

Celebrate Together at openSUSE Conference 2026!

Just like the original fork announcement at the 2018 event, this new milestone deserves to be celebrated in person, face-to-face with the people who make it all possible.

The openSUSE Conference 2026 runs from June 25-27 at the Z-Bau in Nuremberg, Germany. Attendance is completely free! People are encouraged to attend the live and virtual Uyuni community hours meeting during the event.

For more information and to register, visit events.opensuse.org. We can’t wait to see you there to celebrate the closing of this circle and the beginning of the Uyuni community’s official next chapter with openSUSE!