openSUSE 12.3 Beta 1 Has KDE 4.10 RC2 and Linux Kernel 3.7.1

OpenSUSE, a free and Linux-based operating system for PCs, laptops or servers which 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 12.3 Beta 1.

The first beta for the openSUSE 12.3 branch is now available for download, according to plan. The first RC is supposed to be released on February 7, so the developers are asking the users to install and check the distribution for possible bugs.

Highlights of openSUSE 12.3 Beta 1:

• KDE has been updated to version 4.10 RC2;
• support for metadata checksums and improved quota support in Ext4 have been implemented;
• I/O failure statistics, subvolume quotas, quota groups, snapshot diffs, faster fsync and the ability to disable copy-on-write on a per-file base in btrfs have been added;
• Uerspace probes for performance profiling with tools like Systemtap or perf and a new “perf trace” tool modeled after strace are now available;
• The kernel now allows for Android-style opportunistic suspend and has support for suspending to disk and memory at the same time;
• Support for signed kernel modules has been added (the Intel “supervisor mode access prevention” SMAP security feature);
• LLVM, which was extensively described for Milestone 2, is updated to the final 3.2 release;
• LibreOffice 3.6.x will be what ships with openSUSE 12.3
• Linux kernel has been updated to 3.7.1.

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

Download openSUSE 12.3 Beta 1 KDE Live CD from Softpedia.

Download openSUSE 12.3 Beta 1 GNOME Live CD from Softpedia.

Download openSUSE 12.3 Beta 1 Installable DVD  from Softpedia.

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.