Coming late in October, open source users will be sure to find SUSE 10 much more in tune with the needs of Linux desktop power users. I particularly like the inclusion of the Mozilla browser and email suite of Firefox/Thunderbird and some much needed graphics tools.

This release is a step forward for Novell into the open source community as many of the contributions of improvements and bug fixes have been driven through OpenSUSE.org. Some highlights of included applications are evolving in a list at the site.

For those who are seeking to have a complete desktop that includes support for their development efforts as well as overall organization and usage will find this closer to its Windows or Apple OS counterparts. This includes the latest greatest of Gnome and KDE desktops, OpenOffice, the aforementioned Mozilla tools, the popular GAIM multi-protocol chat tool, Scribus for desktop publishing, digiKam for photo management and editing as well as the traditional batch of web development tools.

Bonus prizes include improved wifi drivers, cd/dvd burning support and Subversion.

I have interacted with SUSE since its version 7 release and am looking forward to a gold release of 10. As always, the bold can grab pre-release versions of SUSE 10 from opensuse.org.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 12:40 am, contains 206 words, and is filed under Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. The views and opinions in this blog post are those of its author.