In order to aid loading openSUSE installation and Live images on USB sticks we have a little GUI program called imagewriter. It's a bit dated so Fabian started a newer one with better UI suitable for touch screen that offers the available images on demand, store images offline for conferences and fairs etc: https://github.com/openSUSE/imagewriter2 It's written in C++ with Qt and still needs some work to be production ready:

Recent multipath-tools contains a patch series that allows latency-based path prioritization. However the code is clumsy and not well designed. More importantly, I think that the applied algorithm, which is based on simple methods like comparing averages and standard deviations, is suboptimal. I consider replacing it with a clustering-based approach, using the open source cluster library.

The HPLIP package contains a custom implementation of mDNS queries (actually, 2: one in the core C code and one in python for the administration tools). This implementation is simplistic and sub-optimal. I fixed a problem of this implementation in the past, but unfortunately my patches don't apply on the latest HPLIP releases, and aren't easily forward-ported. The Right Thing to do for mDNS on Linux use use avahi calls. I want to look into using avahi for this purpose in HPLIP.

I want to create a more modern mail storage format, which leverages git and tagging instead of folders to manage my mail. This is inspired by having used notmuch and mbsync for a long time, liking the good aspects of this setup but getting frustrated with the problems. Mainly the issue of storing mail on multiple computers with eventual consistency (for example being able to read mail on my laptop when travelling but my desktop computer when at home).

Investigate on our virt setup. Some things we found with sle12 might no longer be true, new I/O schedulers exist, network setup might have room for speedups as well.

I thought it would be time to learn a new programming language. I decided to go with python, as it's an all-rounder and I have some basic knowledge on that. The idea is to go through the Flask how-to and from there on start to implement my own homepage. This will introduce me to Python and web development at the same time.

We had the idea of a event based, non blocking libzypp API. Would be nice to iron out the requirements and maybe do some prototyping to see if the idea makes sense. Event loop would be based on glib which would make it instantly compatible with at least GTK and Qt applications.

I have a RPi3 + touchscreen on my desk for some time. I'd like to play with Kodi + Mycroft to create some sort of OSS Alexa to connect to my bluetooth speaker. Goal would be to be able to play music via voice activation or using the touchscreen.