Linux Lately: openSUSE 12.3, New Distro, OpenMandriva

With Ubuntu sucking all the air lately, other distributions can't seem to get mentioned. Well, we can't have that when openSUSE 12.3 is just days away from public release and Jos Poortvliet offers a bit of a peak. Matthias Klumpp is proposing a new distribution and the voting has begun in OpenMandriva's Get a Face contest.

openSUSE 12.3

openSUSE 12.3 went Gold Master today and is scheduled for wide public release next week, March 13. To that end, Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE Community manager, posted a sneak peek of the upcoming desktops. Those include "GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXDE and the brand new E17."

He goes into quite a bit of detail, but GNOME 3.6 on openSUSE 12.3 will feature a nice selection of extensions and applications. KDE 4.10 in openSUSE 12.3 " is a relatively quiet release, re-affirming the ‘workhorse' focus of the KDE Desktop and applications." Be sure to check out Jos' post for lots and lots of details.

New Distro?

Matthias Klumpp, Debian and KDE developer, is so disenchanted with Canonical (and Ubuntu) that he proposes a new "user-centric short-cycle Debian-based and close-to-Debian distribution, which would cover many use cases." He's already been discussing some of his ideas with colleagues trying to define "what a perfect distribution would look like."

Klumpp thinks all packages should remain in close sync with Debian's and comply with the Debian policies. In fact, he thinks the whole distro should stay as true to the upstream projects as possible while still offering a separate repository for proprietary blogs and such. Development should be fully open to all Debian developers besides those working directly on it. "The project structure is meritocratic and all desktop environments are treated equally. There is no preferred DE," he adds. Software management will be based on Appstream and Listaller and "make it possible for every distribution to use this solution and help others to adapt it." See that full post for more.

Vote for OpenMandriva's New Face

Last week some of the contenders in the OpenMandriva Get a Face contest were posted, and yesterday the finalists were officially announced. The voting has officially begun and time is running short already. Registration is required to vote and you only have until March 10th 23:59 UTC.