openSUSE 13.2 out: PARTY time!

It's the 5th of November, a date the Brits are told to remember - for me, it is the day after openSUSE 13.2 was released! It's a kickin' release, good reason for a release party tonight at the Belug in Berlin.

13.2

End users will probably notice the revamped YaST most during installation, but the integration of functionality like snapper, Dracut and Wicked is also quite significant. With Snapper, you can roll back upgrades of your system, configuration changes and so on - and if an upgrade made the system unbootable, you just boot from an older version. I haven't seen it in action yet, as unfortunately my btrfs filesystem broke just a week ago - which is of course the one thing snapper can't fix. Yes, bug is fixed, but annoying.

Dracut 'just' leads to faster booting, I've been playing with it on my laptop for a while and it is cool that it made it in now. And yes, 5 second boot is realistic, my new desktop at work does that easily. It also reduces the huge scripted mess that the old mkinitrd system was with something distributions can work together on - that is a good thing in itself, I like collaboration.

I can't say anything smart about Wicked, to be honest. It's network management, but where it fits and what it does exactly somebody else would have to explain in normal-human-terms ;-)

Of course there's much more, including the latest kernel, GNOME, KDE and 5 more desktops (including a preview of Plasma 5.1!), the best selection of what Free Software has to offer and so on. Find a nice overview of openSUSE 13.2 on the info page.

party time

The Party part is easy to explain. The Berlin LUG (BeLUG) has offered their place as party space tonight, I'll give a quick intro into what is new in this release, we'll have some time for debate and then it's all up for grabs. The BeLUGgers promised there would be beer, so what can go wrong?

See you at:
Belug e.V.
Lehrter Straße 53
10557 Berlin
Be there at 18:00 for some informative fun and a beer!

If you aren't in Berlin, check if there is a release party close to you or organize one yourself!