openSUSE 13.1 Off to the Races

The development cycle of openSUSE 13.1, codenamed "Bottle," was officially kicked off today when Andres Silva announced Milestone 1. He said, "As early version, it is expected that this Milestone is not fully functional or very stable. The most prominent changes in openSUSE 13.1 Milestone 1 come from the upgrades that packages are going through."

This release features Linux 3.9.0, Xorg X Server 1.14.1, GCC 4.7, GNOME 3.8.1, and KDE 4.10.2. It also ships with LibreOffice 4.0.2, Firefox 20, and GIMP 2.8.4. Future plans for 13.1 include upgrading GCC to 4.8, testing kmscom, and finish moving everything to systemd (completely removing SysVinit and initscripts). mkinitrd would then be replaced with Dracut. AppArmor will be "promoted further as a preferred security suite" and SELinux will be dusted off and oiled up. GNOME will be upgraded to 3.10 and get a green theme to display as default. KDE should be the latest 4.11.x release possible and will lose Kopete for Telepathy (so getting Phonon to support GStreamer 1.0 is also on the menu).

openSUSE 13.1 Release Schedule

* 2013-05-16: Milestone 1
* 2013-06-13: Milestone 2
* 2013-07-11: Milestone 3
* 2013-08-08: Milestone 4
* 2013-08-12: Stabilization Freeze
* 2013-09-01: Toolchain Freeze
* 2013-09-19: Beta 1
* 2013-10-07: Pre-Release Freeze
* 2013-10-10: Release Candidate 1
* 2013-10-31: Release Candidate 2
* 2013-11-08: Gold Master
* 2013-11-19: General Availability

Get your copy of Milestone 1 at openSUSE.org.