Novell has announced the availability of OpenSUSE 11.1 beta 3, the latest prerelease of the company's community-driven desktop Linux distribution. It offers some nice improvements and comes with the latest versions of popular open source software programs.

This beta release ships with version 2.6.27 of the Linux kernel, which was released earlier this month and includes improved support for webcam devices and the new ath9k wireless driver. Another exciting recent release comes bundled with beta 3: Mono 2.0, the new version of Novell's open source .NET implementation, which is compatible with C# 3.0 and has improved support for Windows.Forms.

OpenSUSE 11.1 beta 3 also includes OpenOffice.org (OOo) 3.0, which was released earlier this month. As we mentioned in our concise review of OOo, Novell maintains a patch set that is widely used by mainstream Linux distributions because it includes a number of really nice Linux-specific improvements. Novell is still in the process of adapting these patches so that they work with the new version of OOo, which means that not all of the features are quite in place yet. One feature that is still missing, for example, is support for native file dialogs in KDE and GNOME.

The beta is available for download from the OpenSUSE web site and is distributed in several flavors. Users can download a comprehensive installation DVD that has a very broad assortment of packages, or they can download an installable Live CD image with KDE or GNOME. I tested both Live CD environments and conducted a full installation from the GNOME LiveCD. The live installer had a few major bugs that will have to be ironed out before the final release.

The most noticeable issue was that I couldn't get the YaST configuration utility to work after I completed the installation. It worked fine when I was running the Live CD, but not when launched from the installed environment. The installer also prompted me to create a user account twice—once in the initial installer wizard and a second time during the post-install configuration process. Aside from these glitches, OpenSUSE 11.1 beta 3 delivers a pretty good user experience.

It comes with GNOME 2.24, which was released last month. That includes a handful of nice improvements, such as support for tabbed file browsing. OpenSUSE's GNOME environment ships with a great assortment of default applications. One particularly pleasing addition to beta 3, for instance, is Tasque—a to-do list utility that can integrate with the Remember the Milk web service.

The version of KDE shipped with beta 3 is 4.1.2. I consider 4.1 the first KDE 4 release that is really ready for regular KDE users. It's usually pretty solid, and it has some great features—like the Folder View plasmoid—that provide tangible improvements over the previous KDE series. One thing that is particularly exciting about the KDE environment in beta 3 is that it includes Amarok 2.0 beta 2 as the default music player.

The Amarok beta, which was released at the beginning of the month, brought a really big architectural change—a transition from SQLite to embedded MySQL. I wanted to get my hands on the Amarok beta when it was released, but I had a lot of trouble getting the version in Amarok's Project Neon package archive to run. Because of the problems I had with it when it was released, this is the first time that I've really had an opportunity to give it a try. It's coming along nicely, and I'm impressed with the progress.

Although OpenSUSE doesn't provide quite the same level of polish and simplicity as Ubuntu, it does offer some compelling advantages. OpenSUSE's unbeatable Mono integration is a big win for many software developers, and the distribution also has great support for desktop search integration via the Beagle indexing system. The OpenSUSE KDE environment is among the best, which is why we have typically used OpenSUSE as our reference platform for KDE testing. The 11.1 release is looking really sharp and continues to play to those strengths. For more details, check out the release notes.