The first development version in the new 13.2 branch has been released

Mar 19, 2014 14:39 GMT  ·  By

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the immediate availability for download of the first Alpha version in the new openSUSE 13.2 branch.

The OpenSuSE developers decided a while ago to change the development cycle for their operating system from eight to ten months. The decision has been made to give more time to the developers to improve the operating system and to provide a much better experience for the users when the operating system is released to the public.

“Our normal 8-month release cycle would warrant a release in July, but the openSUSE team has proposed to change the schedule due to the work they are doing on our tooling and infrastructure. In the discussions on our mailing list it became clear a November release has much support. This is now the tentative plan and we will decide the specific schedule as well as who’s gonna do what and where at the upcoming openSUSE Conference in Dubrovnik,” reads the announcement.

There is no specific schedule decided right now, but the developers are aiming for a November release and they might just have enough time to do it.

The openSUSE developers are asking the community for support and to provide much needed feedback for the new distribution. Even if the development cycle has just started, a lot of changes and new features have been implemented, enough to generate a lot of problems that will need fixing.

Probably one of the most important changes that will be included in openSUSE 13.2 is the modification of the default file system, which is now btrfs (comes with btrfsprogs 3.12). Also, the wicked network management tool and the dracut initrd replacement are now in place.

Other major improvements have made their way into the release. For example, YaST sports now comes with a new look and its Qt frontend has been ported to Qt5, Zypper has been updated to the 1.10.x branch for the next release and features a ton of fixes and improvements, and all the KDE Frameworks 5 packages have been added, as well as the latest Application and Platform releases in the 4.x series.

Also, the entire infrastructure has been updated. rpm has been updated to version 4.11.2, PackageKit 0.8.16 features a new appdata format, systemd has been updated to version 210 and Wayland to version 1.4.

Check the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download openSUSE 13.2, openSUSE 13.2 GNOME Edition, and openSUSE 13.2 KDE Edition right now from Softpedia

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.