The openSUSE project has announced the official release of openSUSE 11.3, a major update of the popular Linux distribution. The new version brings several noteworthy technical improvements and new features for users and developers.

It ships with version 2.6.34 of the Linux kernel and Xorg 7.5. The new open source Nouveau driver is used by default for NVIDIA-based graphics cards now and kernel mode setting is enabled by default for supported hardware. openSUSE’s Zypper command-line tool got several improvements in this release, including support for removing dependencies that are no longer needed.

Although Oracle’s impressive Btrfs filesystem is still not ready for production use, it is made available as an option in openSUSE 11.3 for users brave enough to give it a test run. You can select it in the installer for your main system partition, but you will have to configure a separate boot partition because grub can’t run from Btrfs yet.

KDE SC 4.4.4 is openSUSE’s default desktop environment, but users can also choose GNOME 2.30.1. The lightweight LXDE environment, which is great for netbooks and low-cost tablets, was introduced in 11.3 as a new desktop environment option.

openSUSE 11.3 is available for download from the project’s website. Keep an eye out for our hands-on review, which is coming next week.

http://software.opensuse.org/113/en