OpenSUSE 11.4 Released

MasterPatricko writes with good news from SUSE: "'We are proud to announce the launch of 11.4 in the openSUSE tradition of delivering the latest technology while maintaining stability. The 11.4 release brings significant improvements along with the latest in Free Software applications. Combined with the appearance of new tools, projects and services around the release, 11.4 marks a showcase of growth and vitality for the openSUSE Project!' This release is available now (direct download and bittorrent) as installable DVD or KDE/Gnome LiveCD images, as well as being installable over a network or as a live upgrade from a previous openSUSE release. Highlights include Linux kernel 2.6.37, improved package management, KDE SC 4.6.0, Gnome 2.32 with a preview of Gnome 3, Firefox 4.0, LibreOffice 3.3.1, and the debut of a rolling release project called Tumbleweed. 11.4 images are also already available for customization on SUSEstudio, and you can build your own packages for 11.4 and other GNU/Linux distros on the openSUSE Build Service."

Comments

DOA?

[socceroos]

What's openSUSE's future look like? Since Novell is slowly dying, are we going to see openSUSE fade from being the #2 / #3 distro?

Re:DOA?

[mackil]

I hope not. It's the only Linux distro I can make work with my funky hardware straight out of the box.

Re:DOA?

[syousef]

What's openSUSE's future look like? Since Novell is slowly dying, are we going to see openSUSE fade from being the #2 / #3 distro?

According to distrowatch it's number 5, with about half the hits per day of Ubuntu which is number 1. I can't tell you it's future, but I do think this distro is high quality and arguably undervalued. If it fails it will be due to politics rather than on technical merits. It's good to have good technically competent alternatives (though possibly not as many as we have now!!!). It's certainly not a distro I want to see disappear.

Re:DOA?

[Kr0m]

Novell isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Furthermore, SUSE would continue to live on even if Novell went down under. It has a wide community and a strong presence in the enterprise environment. Plenty of other companies would be more than interested in buying the operating system even if just to keep the duopoly with Red Hat. Excellent products come out with SUSE continuously and it would be hard to replace it's place as it has proven to be a very usable desktop aswell as a solid server.

Re:DOA?

[tomhudson]

The problem with distrowatch numbers is they don't tell you how many people actually do installs, how many people keep their installs, etc. It's just a record of page hits.

For example, I've been using OpenSUSE since 9x ... and I didn't hit distrowatch even for that.

So, I went over to distrowatch, and it gives the OpenSUSE number as ~1200. Right now, I see 1,300 seeders and 2,200 leechers off the i586 and x86_64 dvd torrents, for a total of 3,500 - that's well over the number of people even looking at the ubuntu link, never mind actual downloads.

Re:DOA?

[tomhudson]

I grant you distrowatch is far from perfect, but it's a better indication than none at all. If you know a better way to compare, I'm all ears.

Grab the torrents for each distro, and see how many people are downloading it at any one time. Maintain totals over the year, and that should give you a half-decent number. You'd be surprised at how OpenSUSE and Fedora are still quite active even late in their release cycles.

It works for the **AAs.

Re:DOA?

[MasterPatricko]

There are some statistics based on unique IPs asking for updates on en.opensuse.or/Statistics. Obviously YMMV with those numbers.

Re:DOA?

[MasterPatricko]

Fedora has similar statistics at at fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics.

Re:DOA?

[GCsoftware]

I believe this expresses my feelings with regards to your fine, coherent, insightful comment: Excuse me good sir, but LOLWUT?

Re:DOA?

[tomhudson]

Good points. Of course, if we're keeping score, the big winner is actually RedHat, who makes more revenue (and profit) than all the other distros combined.

Re:Installed

[snookiex]

I've been using openSUSE intermittently since version 8.2 (the SuSE times) and yet easy to install and configure (Yast is a great tool) it always lacks or something or just fails with the basic. I'm not really saying OS is bloated, but KDE. I was a KDE die hard user, but in some point (4.0) they lost their way (Activities? Plasma? Amarok 2.x?). Sorry, but I will stick to OpenBox/GNOME.

SLES/openSuse installs are everywhere

[bored]

Just not in your moms basement. I have yet to see a copy of ubuntu running in a corporate environment. On the other hand, i've seen openSUSE on peoples desktops, and SLES running in data center after data center. Look at the large OEM's linux support list. Usually its RedHat and SLES, and there is a reason. Part of that has to do with the long support cycles, the rest has to do with testing and support of "enterprise hardware". For example, zSeries mainframes, 10G ethernet, SAS, fibre channel, 300+TB RAID arrays, you quickly find that the "popular" distributions don't work. For that matter, the last time I installed ubuntu it took 20 minutes to convince it to work properly in a vmware session, it kept disconnecting the network because it's MAC detection layer wasn't working properly with the vmware adapter. Heck probably 50% of the hardware I own won't run ubuntu. (50% of my personal hardware is non x86, cause i have POWER, sparc, ARM, etc machines).

Plus, as I posted in another thread, modern Yast is actually quite good. You can configured pretty much the whole machine from it now. From basic stuff like network, disk/LVM/RAID, iscsi, etc to nearly every service the machine ships with like Samba, and Bind. While many of the configurations are basic and need further tuning, it gets the beginner most of the way down the road without having to drop to a command line or editor. The package management is just as good as anywhere else with yast/zypper, so much so I can't remember the last time i had to compile something.

Finally, SUSE's binary driver story is a lot better than anyone elses, so a lot of "proprietary" hardware just tends to work. Like say, multihead with openGL support sufficient to run blender...

Re:SLES/openSuse installs are everywhere

[MasterPatricko]

If you're gonna compare with RHEL, you have to compare to SLES, not openSUSE. openSUSE is the Fedora equivalent. And SLES has a similar support lifecycle to RHEL.

As an aside the community is experimenting with a long-term support version of openSUSE as well - look for project Evergreen

.