openSUSE:OpenSUSE for developers

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Talking Points

Why openSUSE - openSUSE and Developers - openSUSE and Users - openSUSE for Admins - openSUSE and other distros - openSUSE and contributing

This page is part of the talking points, and explains why a software developer should use openSUSE

The page is under construction and mostly contains a random bunch of arguments... Feel free to add any braindump or question you have! If you have arguments against having both, add those too, we can discuss them and make even better arguments for the ambasadors.

How is openSUSE for developers?

In terms of tools and chances to push the envelope: fantastic! (By the way: like most other open source operating systems). The openSUSE distribution has all the basic needs for developing software:

• Great editors like vim or Emacs to write source code.
• Source code management tools like GIT or Subversion to handle multiple revisions of your sources.
• Build automation tools like CMake or the autotools that help you build executable programs and libraries from your source code.
• All the packaging tools like RPM that help you bring these binaries to your users.

Of course you can also have all that in integrated development environments (IDEs) like Eclipse or KDevelop and integrated distribution systems like the Build Service or SUSE Studio that give you one-stop solutions to the very complex task of developing software.

And the best part is you can have this always exactly as up-to-date as you need to be as developer, because the distribution offers a stable base but allows you to easily install newer versions of software whenever you need it.

Developer-specific features

openSUSE offers some unique features for developers:

• If you want to write software for on top of environments like KDE or GNOME, you find in the Build Service repositories which track the newest versions of these environments very closely - You just use binaries from those repository and you don't have to build it all by yourself.
• YaST has a function which lets developers install all -devel packages (needed to compile software) for the packages on their system with one click.
• openSUSE offers OBS, an unique tool for software developers and packagers which helps them build and distribute software for a variety of distributions and platforms. See the the openSUSE Build Service Comparison