### openSUSE 12.1 released ###
Version 12.1 of the popular openSUSE distribution got released. It’s the first version numbered after the new numbering scheme and it brings some major changes.
In version 12.1 of the distribution, Gnome now comes in version 3.2 (in openSUSE 11.4, Gnome 3 was only available as preview), KDE in version 4.7. openSUSE is the first major distribution that comes with color management tools for both desktop environments (that could, for example, be used with the ColorHug: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/810955).
Like Fedora, openSUSE now uses the Systemd process for booting. While Ext4 is still the default filesystem, BTRFS is now available as an option in the installer.
The Linux Kernel comes in version 3.1, Firefox in the already outdated version 7 and LibreOffice in the (also slightly outdated) version 3.4.2. Chromium is now available form openSUSE’s standard repository.
The KDE Plasma active One desktop environment for tablets is not integrated with openSUSE yet, but it’s available from the repository.
product highlights: http://en.opensuse.org/Product_highlights
release notes: http://www.suse.de/relnotes/i386/openSUSE/12.1/RELEASE-NOTES.en.html
This year, it was decided to use a new numbering scheme for the distribution. The problem was that X.0 versions got bigger attention than the X.y versions did. In the openSUSE world though, x.y versions didn’t bring less or smaller changes than x.0 releases.
In the new scheme, there aren’t x.0 version any longer. The x number changes every other year. So the now (November 2011) released version is 12.1, July 2012 version 12.2 will come along and in March 2013, we will see version 12.3, the last release in the 12.X series. Version 13.1 will then come in November 2013.
