It is November 16, 2011 and our mirrors have synced. Time to present to you: openSUSE 12.1! This release represents more than eight months of work by our international community and brings you the best Free Software has to offer. Awesome improvements include the latest GNOME 3.2 desktop as well as the newest from KDE, XFCE and LXDE; your ownCloud made easy with mirall; Snapper-shots of your file system; and much, much more.

Desktops

openSUSE 12.1 comes with the new GNOME Shell 3.2. We presented you with a taste of GNOME Shell on openSUSE 11.4. Since then, many bugs have been squashed and numerous small improvements have made life on the Shell more comfortable. Notifications are much nicer, you can now configure your online accounts in one place and Shell handles multiple-screen setups better.

Among the features is color management, something GNOME shares with KDE where openSUSE is the first to integrate the Oyranos color management system. Also new from KDE is Apper, an easier-to-use PackageKit front end.

Cloud things

It is 2011, and most of us use ‘cloud’ technology like having our files on Dropbox, friends on Facebook and music on Spotify. But these technologies are arguably dangerous from a security and privacy point of view. While not solving all problems yet, ownCloud aims to bring these services back under your control.

openSUSE is the first Linux distribution to support ownCloud with its own unique mirall desktop integration. For end users, mirall makes the difference between thinking that ownCloud is interesting and being able to actually use it. Read about mirall and ownCloud in our documentation to find out why!

For more demanding use cases in the small business area, our Virtualization and Cloud repository offers the latest versions of Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and OpenStack for openSUSE 12.1. And we support all the virtualization technologies including Xen 4.1, KVM and VirtualBox which can be managed with the latest virt-manager and open-vm-tools.

SUSE Studio users can already build unique versions of openSUSE 12.1, with custom package selections, artwork, scripts, etc. that can be deployed directly to Amazon EC2 or onto a variety of other cloud platforms.

Under the hood

openSUSE 12.1 includes Snapper, a new and unique tool that employs the snapshot functionality in btrfs to allow you to view older versions of files and revert changes. The integration of Snapper into the zypper package manager allows roll back of system updates and configuration changes.

openSUSE is also the first major distribution to ship the Go programming language, Google’s new open development language. Go is a fast, easy-to-use language that helps programmers handle multi-core, networked machines with the convenience of garbage collection and run-time reflection.

Keep tumblin’ and rollin’!

openSUSE 12.1 can of course also move to Tumbleweed, our cutting-edge rolling release repo which contains the latest stable versions of all software. Tumbleweed lessens the significance and change impact of major releases by updating systems continuously. Existing Tumbleweed users will have to make a small change to their repositories to stay current. For future releases of openSUSE this won’t be needed anymore.

Go and have a lot of fun!

“While the big updates include Snapper, systemd and ownCloud, there are also many smaller enhancements like the improvements to YaST or the work on zypper. And that is only what our own community did,”

said Bryen Yunahsko, member of the openSUSE Board.

“We’re standing on the shoulders of the gigantic open source community. I would not be surprised if openSUSE's latest update has over 300,000 improvements that resulted from efforts in the open source community.”

For more details about the latest and greatest in openSUSE 12.1 visit opensuse.org/12.1 and read our extensive Product Highlights! If you want, go and download it right away from our mirrors.