OpenSUSE 11.4 Released

MasterPatricko writes with good news from SUSE: "'We are proud to announce the launch of 11.4 in the openSUSE tradition of delivering the latest technology while maintaining stability. The 11.4 release brings significant improvements along with the latest in Free Software applications. Combined with the appearance of new tools, projects and services around the release, 11.4 marks a showcase of growth and vitality for the openSUSE Project!' This release is available now (direct download and bittorrent) as installable DVD or KDE/Gnome LiveCD images, as well as being installable over a network or as a live upgrade from a previous openSUSE release. Highlights include Linux kernel 2.6.37, improved package management, KDE SC 4.6.0, Gnome 2.32 with a preview of Gnome 3, Firefox 4.0, LibreOffice 3.3.1, and the debut of a rolling release project called Tumbleweed. 11.4 images are also already available for customization on SUSEstudio, and you can build your own packages for 11.4 and other GNU/Linux distros on the openSUSE Build Service."

DOA?

[socceroos]

What's openSUSE's future look like? Since Novell is slowly dying, are we going to see openSUSE fade from being the #2 / #3 distro?

Re:DOA?

[syousef]

What's openSUSE's future look like? Since Novell is slowly dying, are we going to see openSUSE fade from being the #2 / #3 distro?

According to distrowatch it's number 5, with about half the hits per day of Ubuntu which is number 1. I can't tell you it's future, but I do think this distro is high quality and arguably undervalued. If it fails it will be due to politics rather than on technical merits. It's good to have good technically competent alternatives (though possibly not as many as we have now!!!). It's certainly not a distro I want to see disappear.

Re:DOA?

[Kr0m]

Novell isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Furthermore, SUSE would continue to live on even if Novell went down under. It has a wide community and a strong presence in the enterprise environment. Plenty of other companies would be more than interested in buying the operating system even if just to keep the duopoly with Red Hat. Excellent products come out with SUSE continuously and it would be hard to replace it's place as it has proven to be a very usable desktop aswell as a solid server.

Re:DOA?

[tomhudson]

I grant you distrowatch is far from perfect, but it's a better indication than none at all. If you know a better way to compare, I'm all ears.

Grab the torrents for each distro, and see how many people are downloading it at any one time. Maintain totals over the year, and that should give you a half-decent number. You'd be surprised at how OpenSUSE and Fedora are still quite active even late in their release cycles.

It works for the **AAs.