I’ve been a long time SuSE user, I enjoyed the old boxed sets with the big manuals and CD books full of software. With that view I have always looked forward to every release of the distribution.

openSUSE 11.1 features all of the great new improvements in the Gnome and KDE desktops, combined with many of their own direct innovations.

Having been a user of SuSE, now openSUSE as well as their enterprise offerings such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server I’ve seen this distribution from a lot of different perspectives. The various releases always seems well integrated and have a lot of small touches that give it a polished feel. The enterprise version has key features that fit that role perfect, and the desktop always seems to nail it’s target. I recall when SuSE was the first Linux distribution to ship with the ability to boot off the installer CDs and perform a system recovery that could restore your boot loader or kernel, something that saved my bacon once or twice when I was still learning “the right way” to do things!

These days I’d say the gap between distribution features is starting close up, but did I find something that stood out about openSUSE? Watch the video and find out:

Some major features by category

In some ways openSUSE is a distribution (like others) caught in a transition world between KDE3 and KDE4. As the KDE user base makes it’s switch, the developers must spend a lot of energy in making both KDE3 and KDE 4 work well, on top of Gnome and XFCE. It’s difficult task I am sure, but I think in a year or so it will have paid off, as KDE4 seems to be steadily reaching a point where it will be useable for the everyone. Despite this nether desktop environment seems to lack polish, truly a job well done!

Great job to the openSUSE team, they’ve got a great release on their hands!