openSUSE 11.4 Launch Party

Today is the day the openSUSE Project releases openSUSE 11.4 with many new features like KDE Plasma 4.6, GNOME 2.32 and a GNOME Shell preview, LXDE and XFCE and many applications like LibreOffice, Firefox 4.0 and Scribus 1.4! You can find a list of new features and cool things (english) here: http://en.opensuse.org/Product_highlights and a nice presentation here http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Presentations#openSUSE_11.4

After a “bad update” on my netbook with Arch Linux :( and after listening to the opinions of some friends I decided to try openSUSE. Besides of a quick and easy installation, openSUSE is very easy to configure. With YaST, the configuration tool, you can do complicated things very easy – it is better than what other distributions have. And even if you don’t use openSUSE, you must have checked out suse studio susestudio.com and the open build service build.opensuse.org. With Suse Studio you can create your own operating system together with YOUR selection of software (you can even upload your own or add repositories) and images and other stuff. With OBS you can build packages for all Linux distributions, including debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, CentOS and more. Yes, openSUSE is THAT cool and openSUSE 11.4 is part of that:D

And is not only about software, openSUSE is really doing great, with the work on an openSUSE Foundation it will be a real Free distribution, not controlled by a big company but by the community. With Canonical doing stupid things lately, showing that a distribution needs a foundation and not a ‘dictator’, I think that rocks.

So, such a cool release deserves to get all the Linux people together.  Jos Poortvliet, community manager for openSUSE, is in Porto Alegre now and wants to have a release party. There is no page for Porto Alegre yet on the http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Launch_parties_11.4 page but we can easily pick a pub and have a drink or two and talk about Linux, GNOME, KDE, and everything cool in Free Software ;-)