The number of users of openSUSE, the community GNU/Linux distribution supported by the Germany SUSE Linux company, has grown, with an average of 400,000 DVD images being downloaded each month.

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: