After a few delayed milestones, the fourth even got canceled – there has been quite a number of disruptive changes in our Factory development distribution, but we’re starting to settle down and announce the availability of Beta 1 today!

A large number of major changes has finally landed: GCC 4.7, Grub2 (status update), the new LibreOffice and much more.
New things

On the graphical side this milestone now features gimp 2.8 (with single window option) and the latest updates to GNOME and KDE packages (including Qt 4.8.1 and KDE SC 4.8.3, GNOME 3.4.2). Heavy work has been going on in the area of bringing Xorg 12.1 and split-up Xorg packages to Factory. Moving from there, the new graphical stack combined with the new compiler tools (llvm, GCC 4.7) and the new Mesa can bring cool new stuff: llvmpipe bringing gnome-shell to non-accelerated systems and the svga gallium driver featuring 3D support to VMware VMs. We have switched from the old bootsplash to the modern Plymouth with our own plymouth openSUSE theme.
Get it

Download it from software.opensuse.org/developer. As usual, a list of the most annoying bugs is being maintained and you can see the list of bugs and/or file a new one in Bugzilla. Read on for some details on the release and how to help!

The roadmap aims the first release candidate for June 14.