Its here! The first openSUSE 11.3 Milestone. This is the first step toward the next openSUSE release. The most important goal of this first milestone is to test the build interactions between newly added features in openSUSE Factory, also known as “get the snapshot to build”. It is in no way feature complete or ready for daily usage. There is no code freeze for any component yet, so many major changes are still to come.

This 11.3 Milestone build will give you a first glimpse of the direction we are pushing the distribution. Read more to learn about the major changes that happened since the release of openSUSE 11.2.

Desktops
GNOME is at the development version 2.29.5. It is the first GNOME release for year 2010 and fifth development release towards 2.30. A lot of things happened. The webcam booth application cheese completely dropped its HAL dependency. The accounts dialog of the instant messenger Empathy has been reworked to reduce the number of steps to add a new account and Epiphany, the web browser, now stores all form authentication data in the GNOME Keyring. Want to know more? Check out the GNOME 2.29.5 release announcement!

KDE was updated to the first release candidate of the new 4.4 Desktop. The Nepomuk Semantic Search framework has made leaps forward. A new storage backend makes it a lot faster and a timeline view of your files makes finding files used in the past easier. The Plasma Desktop has been further polished. The new widget explorer provides a richer experience for managing desktop widgets. Plasma widgets can now be shared with other users over the network and the handling of storage devices in the desktop shell has been streamlined. Also, in 4.4 Plasma’s little sibling, the Netbook shell debuts as a technology preview. The KDE Development Platform adds the new KAuth authorization framework for easy and secure privilege escalation. The KDE project has a detailed release announcement!

LXDE – the “Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment” is a new player in the openSUSE desktop selection. It is an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving desktop environment. It comes with a beautiful interface, multi-language support, standard keyboard short cuts and additional features like tabbed file browsing. LXDE uses less CPU and less RAM than other environments. It is especially designed for computers with low hardware specifications.