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!