Some very cool updates have landed for openSUSE

May 18, 2015 12:45 GMT  ·  By

The openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling release version of the famous operating system has moved to KDE Plasma 5.3, and it looks like it's a smooth transition, although any help from the community is always welcomed.

The OpenSuSE Tumbleweed distro is where all the cool things are happening. All the new packages are implemented and tested first in Tumbleweed, which makes this the perfect platform to find out if there are any problems with some of the new packages. The fact that it follows a rolling release model means that major changes like the adoption of a new Linux kernel or a desktop environment can be done with a simple system upgrade.

You might think that it's a great model and that too few operating systems are kept to adopt it. If you like to test all the bleeding edge package that a rolling release distro is the perfect place. Arch Linux is proof that it can work, although that OS has its own problems, and developers are always facing the danger of regressions.

openSUSE Tumbleweed rolls Plasma 5.3 updates

Even if openSUSE Tumbleweed is updated all the time, it doesn't mean that the devs push all the latest packages. In fact, until they adopted the latest Plasma desktop, they were still using the old KDE SC 4.4, which is no longer technically supported since November, 2014. It took six months for the openSUSE developers to consider Plasma 5.x stable enough.

"KDE Plasma 5 is the new default, replacing KDE 4 in Tumbleweed. We understand that this is controversial to some of the users, and others very much welcome the change. Please ensure to constructively report your issues to the KDE Team," wrote Dominique Leuenberger in his weekly address.

In fact, KDE Plasma 5.3 hit the repositories a few days ago, but it's a big change and users need to report any problems that could arise. Also, the devs announced that Ruby 2.22 is now default, and that the team is preparing for the GCC 5.0 migration.