TBH I did not expect to see a third-party OS support so soon after launch, but I am happy to announce that a few weeks back Ultra96 received support for openSuse and runs mainline Linux.
https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Ultra96
There are some caveats still:
- No Display Port support yet
- No USB3 support (USB2 on USB3 ports works)*
- No fan control
*The USB3 support bit is weird as in a USB3 device gets detected as USB3 and lsusb shows full USB3 speeds but in reality, only USB2 speeds can be achieved.
But apart from that everything seems to work fine, and more support will be added in due time.
