openSUSE sees 1600 new installations and 500.000 package installations per months, according to Alberto Planas, a member of the openSUSE development since 2012 and an employee of SUSE.

He mentioned the figures during a presentation at the annual openSUSE conference held in Nuremberg from 22 June to 26 June.

openSUSE has three streams of development: Tumbleweed is a rolling distribution that has all the latest stable versions of software.

The main development codebase is known as Factory, which is bleeding edge stuff not guaranteed to be fully stable and not intended to be used by humans. The core system packages receive automated testing via openQA.

Alberto Planas giving his presentation at the openSUSE conference in Nuremberg.

And then there is Leap, which uses the source from the SUSE's enterprise distribution and is rock-solid as far as stability.

Some other interesting facts from Planas' presentation:

• The openSUSE team sees about 60.000 Tumbleweed users, half of which are frequently updating.
• Tumbleweed has doubled the number of installations during last year.
• Most openSUSE installations are done via DVD-Images.
• x86_64 is the CPU architecture of choice.
• The standard way to install openSUSE hence is: DVD on x86_64 and then upgrading to a recent system.
• The geographical distribution of openSUSE is unchanged: About one third of the users come from Germany (according to GeoIP), many others from the rest of Europe, followed by 12% out of the US, 5% from Russia and 3% from Brazil.