This week marks the first milestone release of openSUSE, on the road to 11.3. With their current stable release, 11.2, the distribution made KDE the official default desktop and thanks to their efforts, created the greatest implementation ever.

Now, with version 4.4 on the way the KDE desktop experience from openSUSE is looking to be better than ever.

The KDE Live CD includes a “KDE Quick Start” guide for assisting users find their way around the desktop. It’s an excellent, easy to read document which explains the ins and outs of KDE, providing lots of advice along the way. It’s also available under the GNU Free Documentation License.

The other improvements to openSUSE with this milestone release are what we would come to expect, updated versions of major applications and components. These include:

* Linux kernel 2.6.32
* Firefox 3.6
* OpenOffice.org 3.2-beta4
* K3b 1.69, the KDE optical burning application (en route to 2.0 stable Qt4 release)
* Amarok 2.2.2, the KDE music player
* Digikam 1.0.0, the KDE Photo Manager digikam

There are some other major benefits to this release, including an update of Zypper, openSUSE’s package manager. Like Ubuntu’s Personal Package Archive, the openSUSE community has access to a wide range of additional repositories. These often include official packages for the latest versions of major applications such as OpenOffice.org and even KDE itself. openSUSE also offers One Click Installs, the online build service and even the graphical configuration tool YaST (if you like that sort of thing).

Finally, we have a distribution which has a universal feel, looks great from start to end, integrates seamlessly with every component. There’s really only one word to describe this, “sleek.” No other distro integrates GTK applications into KDE4 like openSUSE does out of the box. Of course, this is nothing new, openSUSE had already achieved this in their previous release. Thanks to the polish of KDE 4.4 however, this release is even better. Make no mistake, openSUSE is the benchmark for KDE distributions. Nothing else even comes close.

Read full story.