One of the major and most popular Linux distributions has reached another edition today, openSUSE 11.0. openSUSE is well known for its ease of use and this version comes with more than 200 new features, a brand new installer and faster package management due to the updates in the ZYpp stack.

As 'option' seems to be the word that openSUSE revolves around, you have the possibility to choose between KDE 4, KDE 3.5 and GNOME 2.22, all of them powered by Compiz Fusion with its beautiful eye-candy. The GNOME edition used in openSUSE 11 is slightly modified, to provide a unified look and feel. The panel layout that you were used to from GNOME was changed and you will get the 'slab' panel manager from Novell. This change is probably not welcome by all the users, as the new menu is somewhat counter-productive and you have to know all the internal names of applications if you want to use the search feature from 'slab', as it has no auto-complete. As you probably want to install openSUSE 11.0 on your computer, you can use this installation guide to find out how to do it.

If you want to try out the KDE 4 edition of openSUSE 11.0, you will really enjoy it. The guys from KDE have been doing a good job lately and the improvements in usability and functionality can be seen by using the somewhat modified version that's used in openSUSE. Kcontrol was replaced with Systemsettings, a feature that will allow you to perform system configuration tasks much easier. If you really love a desktop with eye-candy you should know that KWin, KDE's window manager, now supports 3D desktop effects.

After Ubuntu's decision to use Firefox 3.0 beta 5 as default browser, openSUSE 11.0 makes this step too. You won't get stuck with the beta release, it gets updated after you install the distro and go online. Another application that's somewhat behind is OpenOffice.org 2.4.0. After updating it, you get the latest version, 2.4.1. OpenOffice's splashscreen is really gorgeous and clean looking.

Since openSUSE 10.3, NetworkManager was improved and now supports multiple network interfaces, UTMS and EV-DO cards, reaching the 0.7 version. The Linux kernel used by openSUSE 11.0 is 2.6.25, glibc is now version 2.8 and GCC was updated to 4.3.

Download openSUSE 11.0 right now from Softpedia.