CyberLadies Empower Women With openSUSE Leap 16

Over the weekend, in Prague, Czechia, Zuzana Pechová organized a full-day workshop together with Terka Lukešová and Markéta Gregorová as part of the CyberLadies z.s. community initiative. The goal was to introduce ten women to Linux installation, basic desktop use, and common open-source alternatives to commercial software. The workshop also covered how to work with essential proprietary tools when there is no other option. See CyberLadies Instagram post and Instagram reel from the workshop.

Zuzana selected openSUSE Leap 16.0 for the event. Her main reason was that openSUSE is a distribution with strong European roots, which matches the goals of digital sovereignty that CyberLadies promote. She also valued the simple installation process provided by the new Agama installer, which makes the system accessible even for complete beginners. Zuzana’s feedback helped inspire the creation of an openSUSE page dedicated to EU digital sovereignty.

The event was a positive experience for all participants. Zuzana also learned new things herself. She discovered how differently various laptops behave during installation. For future events she plans to reserve more time for the installation step and adjust the schedule so that everyone has an activity to work on while a few machines need extra attention.

Zuzana described the experience with a smile. “As a cherry on the cake, we even found an undocumented issue with keyboard layout handling, so our workshop continues to improve openSUSE even after it ended.”

Zuzana thanked all participants for their enthusiasm. She also expressed gratitude to Akademie CZ.NIC for providing classroom space and to the openSUSE Project for supporting the workshop.

Published on behalf of Zuzana Pechová with her permission. Thank you, Zuzana, for empowering women, supporting the open-source community, choosing openSUSE, and bringing fun back into education.