OpenSUSE 11.2 milestone 8, the last beta version of the 11.2 development cycle, has been released today. I gave a try to the KDE live CD., from which I am writing. The system booted quickly to be a live CD, and loaded the KDE 4.3 desktop without any trouble, showing the very good looking environment showed below.
KDE 4.3 is rich of widgets that can be used to make your desktop richer in functionality and more pleasurable to look and see. You can, for example, add notes, a dictionary, weather forecasts, international clock and many other widgets, like unit converter, calculator, system monitors, download manager and so on. You can see an example below.
I forgot, you can also add funny stuff, like eyes. Oh wait, Geeko (openSUSE chameleon, for those not familiar)is watching you!
The bloated Konqueror file manager has been replaced with the most efficient, cleaner and easier to use Dolphin. Konqueror is still available, but not used by default for file management.
You can see the KDE control centre, which received major improvements from my point of view, if compared with the KDE 3 control centre. Tools are better organized, and divided in two categories: General and Advanced, to separate commonly used features from more specific ones.
YaST control centre has been redesigned to use Qt 4, and fits smoothly in the new KDE 4 look and feel.
The OpenOffice, as well as typical KDE applications as Digikam and Amarok are included in the live, and works correctly.
For Twitter and messengers lovers, Choqok provides support for Twitter and Identi.ca, while Kopete supports all the most commonly used messenger protocols. I have always been critical about Kopete, however it seems significant improvements went on also on this KDE application.
Of course also all the other application that traditionally come with openSUSE are present. The system is responsive and I did not meet any major problem in hardware recognition. According to the release announcement, there still are some annoying bugs, but milestone 8 looks very promising. A lot more promising that milestone 7, which was unusable on my laptop due to the frequent crashes and a problem with the system thermal zones. I was also certainly impressed by how clean KDE 4 has become compared to KDE 3: significant steps were done in the right direction of providing a clean and modern desktop, without sacrificing the high number of features, which has always been the peculiarity of KDE. To conclude, it seems openSUSE 11.2 is on the right path to become a good release, able to make us forget openSUSE 11.1 and all the problems it caused. It is too early to say it will be successful, since things can still be broken, but the path is the right one.
A small side note: Why did I test the KDE release and not the GNOME one? There are multiple reasons for this. First of all openSUSE decided to default to KDE, as a consequence I think a fair evaluation must be done considering what openSUSE prefers to offer. Second, KDE 4.3 should be finally a usable release of KDE 4 for daily use, and I was curious to see what it has to offer to me. Someone asked if I this means I am ready to switch to KDE. The answer is no. GNOME is still my choice, but KDE 4 might be a good alternative.