At the end of last week, we unleashed RC1 of our next openSUSE release (12.1, scheduled for November 16th), and it comes with GNOME 3.2.1, which went out only a couple of days before RC1. Go grab a live image if you want to play with either openSUSE or GNOME 3 :-) There are still a few bugs here and there to iron out, but overall, the experience is very solid!

Anonymous openSUSE 12.1 user

"I upgraded to openSUSE 12.1, and this dramatically improved my life!" — Anonymous

It really feels good to have this openSUSE release nearing, as we missed the GNOME 3.0 boat (openSUSE 11.4 was released one month before GNOME 3.0): I, and I assume a few others, felt that we were stuck in the past with GNOME 2 in our world for so long. Sure, the work on backporting GNOME 3.0 and then 3.2 to openSUSE 11.4 helped, but we really wanted to share what was in Factory... Especially as there was really a lot of work to properly integrate this new GNOME.

I'm obviously really glad to see the GNOME 3 love in openSUSE, but looking back at the last few months, what is even greater to me is that we got many amazing people contribute to the GNOME team through-out this cycle. I'm sure I'll forget some of them (apologies for that, let me know so I add your name!), but here's a quick list:

  • Atri Bhattacharya
  • Bjørn Lie
  • Casual J. Programmer
  • Dominique Leuenberger
  • Frédéric Crozat
  • Gary Lin
  • Guido Berhörster
  • Joey Zheng
  • Kirill Kirillov
  • Malcolm Lewis
  • Nelson Marques
  • Richard Brown
  • Sankar P
  • Scott Reeves
  • Stephen Shaw

Their various contributions include updating packages, fixing bugs, testing, polishing the experience, supporting users, providing ideas, and more! Go ahead and thank those people when you meet them (virtually or in the real life): they all make the GNOME team rock! And who knows, maybe next time you'll also be one of those rock stars?