openSUSE 12.1 Milestone 3 is Available for Download!

In the past it was called SUSE Linux (which was based on the awesome Slackware) but then Novel, just like RedHat, decided to create a "community driven" version of the GNU/Linux distribution and later called it openSUSE. This Germany based distribution has been around for a while and is one of the most popular one among the GNU/Linux geeks since it has a complete set of tools of its own (Yast control center for instance) and easy to use + when properly configured, it is a very solid OS.

Although it's a bit "heavy" for my taste but for those of you who loves it then you must be aware of the upcoming openSUSE 12.1 release (will be released in 2011/11/11). And in preparation for that they've already released two milestone releases and yesterday they officially announced the availability of the milestone 3!.

The openSUSE developers do take their time and unlike with many other major distributions who releases a new version within 6 months ... openSUSE on the other hand takes her time and do a lot of testing and if I'm not mistaken they release a new version around 10-12 months cycle which in my opinion makes sense.

Gnome Shell in openSUSE 11.4...

Anyhow, this milestone release brings some major improvements and new version of popular applications such as...

*. Mozilla Firefox 5.

*. The Free email client, Thunderbird 5.0 (has major improvements, faster start up times, etc).

*. Kernel 3.0 rc 7 (well there's nothing new in Kernel 3.0... it's just playing with the numbers :P).

*. Libreoffice 3.3.3.1 (although we do have the Libreoffice 3.4... but they've decided to go with the 3.3x series instead).

*. Tomboy 1.7.1 (the popular note taking awesome app for the Gnome desktop).

Although these are just the main ones to mention but this release do bring a lot of bug fixes and version updates to a lot of both Gnome and Qt/KDE desktop related apps as usual too. The openSUSE 12.1 is nowhere near the final release since according to their roadmap page they do have a lot of work to do but if you like you can contribute by downloading it, testing and reporting feedback by using this milestone 3 release nonetheless.