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Its time to upgrade from OpenSuse 10.x to OpenSuse 11.0

We hear that openSUSE 11.0 is just about to come out in some hours time, and it's high time to consider to go from a .2/.3 release to a .0 release? Well here are some main reasons why:

QT4 Installer:
Obviously the first thing you see when you upgrade / install an operating system is the installer screen. openSUSE 11.0 introduces a beautifully designed new QT 4 installer, that runs circles around any current Windows / Linux or Mac OX Installer (in terms of looks).

Package Management (Zypper):
Zypper has gone through MANY changes since it’s time in openSUSE 10.3. Currently 11.0 is running zypper 0.11.6-4.1, and package management is done so much smarter and faster (installing application, updating repo’s everything is much faster on openSUSE 11.0 then it was in previous versions).

Xorg:
Xorg has been updated to 7.3 (upgraded from 7.2 in openSUSE 10.3) and has many updates to Intel / Nvidia based xorg drivers. (if running Nvidia / ATI I recommend installing ATI / Nvidia proprietary drivers). Also note that AIGLX is enabled by default now.

Kernel:
openSUSE 11.0 ships with the pae kernel by default and is version 2.6.25 which has seen many improvements in virtualization, scheduling and obviously hardware support since 10.3’s release with 2.6.22.

KDE 3.5.9:
Has many improvements from KDE 3.5.7 which shipped with openSUSE 10.3. Many enhancements were done to PIM (Personal Identification Manager, ie Kmail, Kontact etc) along with many bugfixes since then.

KDE 4:
Although KDE 4.1 wasn’t released in time for openSUSE 11.0 you can upgrade to it using one of the openSUSE Build Services. With that said, openSUSE 11.0 ships with KDE 4.0.4 and will stay with that line for the life of the product. I honestly think it is on its way to being a very kick ass Desktop Environment, BUT, I just cannot afford to use it as my default DE on my production machines, since there are still some issues (mostly in plasma).

GNOME 2.22:
Pretty much enough said on that. GNOME 2.22 had many many improvements in everypart of GNOME, which can be found here:
http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.22/

There are tons of other reasons and updates that have been done, that I haven’t captured in this quick blog. This is just to help steer the people on the grasps of “Should I upgrade or not” to just go ahead and do it. Many of the other notable updates are:

NetworkManager (although it still has a few issues with communication with YaST configurations)
OpenOffice (2.4.1).
Wine (1.0 rc by default but with the release of 1.0 today, I expect it to make the update repo).
Amarok (1.4.9.1)

If you feel I’ve missed something important please let me know and i’ll add.

The most important things though:
If you find a bug report it http://bugzilla.novell.com
This will help openSUSE mature more, and make 11.x be a great long lasting distribution.




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