openSUSE 11.3 was released yesterday (15th July). Much of the development for openSUSE has been in adding features to support mobile devices. Two interfaces are included to make this a perfect installation for netbooks. Plasma Netbook Workspace is part of KDE and fully supports web and social networking applications. The other netbook interface is MeeGo, which is optimised for social networking and multimedia sites.
Also included are many features that make openSUSE 11.3 work with mobile devices. For those using the Gnome desktop, Nautilus can now access files on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
A new feature is the SpiderOak cloud service, which is free to openSUSE users. This allows syncing across all widely used desktop, laptop and mobile devices, including the iPhone. The encryption makes the service pretty secure as well. Files can also be shared.
Users can now choose the new BTR filesystem in the installer. It's pretty stable, but not ready for use in high-reliability systems and the current bootloaders won't recognise BTRFS.
LXDE is now included as a desktop in openSUSE 11.3. Its smaller than Gnome and KDE, making it more efficient.
Linux Mint 9 KDE This release was announced last week. It includes more or less the same improvements of the LXDE version, including the USB imagewriter and the backup system that makes it very easy to port system configurations and reload all the installed software to future installations of Linux Mint. Linux Mint will boot faster than previous versions, and the BleachBit program maintains the system's efficiency by removing junk files. As this is becoming a popular choice for netbook installations, it fully supports wireless and mobile broadband connections.
openSUSE 11.3 It's still an excellent distribution for servers and desktops, but a lot of work has also gone into making openSUSE an ideal choice for a netbook operating system. The LiveCD can be installed to a USB drive. KDE also has a Plasma Netbook setting that can be enabled, and some Moblin interface code. Users also have the option of working with the new LXDE desktop.
LXDE is just as easy to use and as good as Gnome, but much cleaner. The artwork, default theme and interface have been well thought-out and excellently designed, which I reckon is a major contributor to Mint's success. With the LXDE version of Mint released, many users with low-spec hardware will no doubt be giving this a try. When running as a live-CD, Mint had no problems mounting the existing volumes and external drives attached to the system.
Some users have replaced their default netbook OS with this version of Linux Mint, which is perfect for the average user. For those who want a more specialist installation for multimedia editing, software development or scientific work, there are roughly 55,000 packages listed by the Software Manager to choose from. Even better, the backup program will store a list of the installed packages so they can be reloaded onto a future Debian/Ubuntu/Mint installation.
The Windows installer makes a return, so this distro can be run as an application within the Windows desktop. This gives users a good introduction to Linux before switching to it.
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