There are 3 days for openSUSE 11.1 to be released. December 17th, 2008 will be a day of joy because the GNU/Linux community is going to meet the 11.1 release of openSUSE. Why is it so important? Let’s take a review of the openSUSE project.

The openSUSE project is a worldwide community program sponsored by Novell that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. The program provides free and easy access to openSUSE. Here you can find and join a community of users and developers, who all have the same goal in mind – to create and distribute the world’s most usable Linux. openSUSE also provides the base for Novell’s award-winning SUSE Linux Enterprise products.

openSUSE

openSUSE

The last paragraph, taken from the openSUSE project page summarizes the spirit of the openSUSE GNU/Linux distribution. If you read carefully, notice that openSUSE is intended to be user friendly, so, it is thought to be used for as much as possible people.

Personally, I am very satisfied with openSUSE. It gives me the opportunity to use both GNOME and KDE desktops. Actually, there are many distributions wich includes support just for GNOME or to KDE. However, only a few GNU/Linux distributions keep support for both desktop environments on the same time, in the same release. Moreover, when using openSUSE you have the possibility to install new software just with a click or using the highly advanced package manager YUM.

openSUSE is the free alternative to SUSE Linux Enterprise, which is advocate to use in corporate environments running servers and certified applications. openSUSE is widely used to test software that will be used later in SUSE Linux Enterprise. By doing it, all the users gain more, because, free users received the highly advanced openSUSE distribution (openSUSE 11.1, right now) and Novell ensures that they provide the best quality software to be used in critical corporate environments.

To check out the openSUSE 11.1 screenshots, please visit this link.