The new version of OpenSUSE comes with the latest KDE and GNOME releases

Oct 11, 2013 12:29 GMT  ·  By

OpenSUSE, a free and Linux-based operating system for PCs, laptops, or servers that you can use to surf the web, manage your e-mails and photos, do office work, and play videos or music, is now at version 13.1 RC1.

OpenSUSE developers have been moving very fast and now they've already released the first RC1 in the series. We can assume that this will not be the only one.

A lot of changes have been implemented, but the biggest ones are the introduction of GNOME 3.10 and KDE 4.11.2. This is the second distribution to add GNOME 3.10 as default, so close after the launch of the latest GNOME stable.

The developers have also managed to squash a lot of bug and they've enlisted the help of the community to fix as many problems as possible.

“As you probably saw last month, we organized a Beta Hackaton to fix as many bugs as we could. The event was quite a success and while the report isn’t out yet (soon!) we can already tell you that over 120 people fixed about 140 bugs and screened another 440! With such numbers, you can imagine we have great expectations for our upcoming release,” reads the announcement.

OpenSuSE is also the first distribution to dabble with the btrfs file system in a serious manner. It's been a long time coming, but there are always problems. OpenSUSE will not feature btrfs, unfortunately, but the next generation will most likely ditch EXT4.

A complete list of changes and new features can be found in the official announcement.

Download openSUSE 13.1 RC1 KDE Live CD Download openSUSE 13.1 RC1 GNOME Live CD Download openSUSE 13.1 RC1 Installable DVD

Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only. Please report bugs to the official openSUSE Bug Tracker.