With red carpets rolling out in Hollywood, you’d expect some applause for the openSUSE 11.4 RC2 release, which has now gone live ahead of 11.4 proper. But with much of the hard work going in behind the scenes, this superb release candidate isn’t getting the fanfare it deserves. The recent Bug Squashing day saw 132 bugs updated so few serious issues remain. Improvements in the ‘backend’ work includes some tweaks to Wifi supplicant and drivers, and a host of small fixes across the distribution which enhance stability and performance. The addition of MediaCurl backend with zsync support to libzypp iut is already being noticed. openSUSE user and forum member Pier Andreit comments that “yast install/remove software is a thunderbolt!”

The transition from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice still has a few minor documentation blips but more importantly, users should be cautious. the raft of new functionality has created a few specific issues, such as loss of data in tables. Though not quite ready for the production environment, user feedback is critical for smoothing performance and reliability. KDE 4.5 is also running beautifully though 32 BIT nVidia users may have a bug.