Looking for a greener distribution?

Join the thundring herd of geekos!

Last week we released openSUSE 12.3 and the responses from the community and the press were better than ever before. Lots of journalists announced we've moved firmly in the top spot or top-three of favorite distro's and quite a few are running openSUSE now. Seeing the many blog posts, tweets, facebook posts and Google+ discussions, the community feels very much the same!

Now maybe you're not 100% happy with your current distribution. Maybe it isn't entirely stable or you sometimes would like it if things just worked. Or you worry about the decision making process and the future of your current choice. Maybe you don't want to wait for stuff to compile anymore.

I know, the technical differences between distributions are not huge. I'd even argue they are small - differences in philosophy and how they are developed are bigger, however. And I can imagine one feels more comfortable with a project which picks collaboration and sharing over secrecy and Not Invented Here. I know what I prefer. Technically, openSUSE belongs to the top distributions as well. And while nothing is perfect we at least make it darn easy to fix stuff without administrative sillyness.

So whatever the reason for looking somewhere else - I think it is fair to say that openSUSE should be on your short list of distributions to try.

To help with the trying, I called in help from our community and created an openSUSE introduction and a cheat sheet for moving over to openSUSE from a variety of other distributions. Check it out on news.opensuse.org!

As bonus, I'll just give you three links that'll be helpful getting your openSUSE up and running quickly:

• Androbit offers some proprietary applications and drivers
• opensuse-community.org has a one-click-install for patented multimedia stuff
• the software.opensuse.org packages overview is the easiest way to find and install extra or updated software on openSUSE.
• Get some more software installation tips and read some interesting KDE and GNOME tips & tricks.
  

And of course you can download openSUSE 12.3 on software.opensuse.org and find out what is new in the announcement.

Have a lot of fun!

openSUSE 12.3 is out!

Edit: So, now, really, the smoke is green and openSUSE 12.3 is out!

It's been an interesting release cycle for me. It was my first full release cycle (ok, short one, just 6 months) with the new openSUSE team. Interesting ride.

But today, it is party time. Tonight I will finally see the famous Artefakt as that's where the party will be - see the event here. Yay!

In the last days we released three sneak previews of what's new in openSUSE 12.3, each getting a lot of reads and comments:

• For desktop users with a intro to GNOME (I'm new to that, still) and a series of more 'pro' tips for KDE apps as well as a newbie-friendly intro video to KDE Plasma Desktop by +Cameron Wiebe.
  
  I must admit that writing the GNOME part was a tad frustrating, used as I am to a KDE environment and all its perks and some things drove me almost mad (or wonder what @#$%@ designed $SPECIFIC_THING). But at the same time, it is completely obvious that a great many things are extremely well designed in GNOME Shell. A number of basic workflows are clearly well thought out and polished and that is very noticeably missing on the KDE side. As Alex Fiestas said: you notice that not many KDE developers ever start their favorite desktop on a 'fresh' user account. Application windows which require resizing is really the least of the problem there - yes, the defaults are still not very nice. But once you start configuring, you can have it any way YOU want, an unbeatable advantage if you've got a busy life like me. As I write in the preview, I think it's a trade-off.
• Will and Michal wrote a "openSUSE 12.3 for servers" article with OpenStack and some other things. Personally, I'm not exactly deep into that stuff but hey, if you run a server I bet it is awesome ;-)
• The third sneak preview was about software handling and getting new stuff on openSUSE. We've got our famous Open Build Service - yes, the 200K packages on it and the 35K accounts do not all point to unique packages or active packagers but there is plenty of action there. We've got a great search front end with software.opensuse.org and a less-nice-but-still doing-the-job one-click-install to get the goodies. When will that new one-click-install be finished, I wonder?

Now, let me include two video's I'm extremely happy with: the KDE intro and a demonstration of installing the new LibreOffice 4.0 from OBS.




PS I hope to go to the Owncloud 5 release party in Berlin, maybe cu there ;-)

Now, go, get openSUSE 12.3!