No, I have not even started yet, but I do have some more thoughts on my planned “A Month With Linux” thing coming up in the future. I’ve been waffling on my end, especially with the imminent release of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, but I am going to go through with it at some point in the future.
What I AM waiting for is the next release of openSUSE. As such, you will notice on my “sidebar” a countdown image for the next release of openSUSE, 13.1. I’m pretty excited about this release for a number of reasons:
- openSUSE 13.1 is supposed to be the base platform from which SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 is going to be based. That means a lot of updated software is going to be getting support from SUSE. I’m most interested in seeing how both KDE and GNOME have matured (especially with the recently GNOME 3.10 release).
- I kind of like to mess around with file systems a little bit (THAR BE DRAGONS), and Btrfs has me a little excited. I really like ZFS and will probably end up using FreeNAS for something at work this year, but Btrfs looks to be where the Linux kernel is headed and I want to play with it some more.
- The move to Ruby that YaST team just completed makes me a little bit excited about the platform. I like Ruby, so I like that a major component has moved its entire code base to Ruby and I want to watch what happens.
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 is a really solid GNOME 2 distribution and I am interested to see which of the GNOME 3/KDE 4 divide they end up on … so I need to watch what happens with openSUSE 13.1+ to get an idea of what the future might bring.
- I want to maybe move some of our older, less essential servers to openSUSE and want to get a feel for the tooling for this distro.
So, a lot to work with. That is why I’m holding off on a final decision until after 13.1 is released and I can take a look at it. I have put SLED 11 back on my Lenovo ThinkPad X220 for the time being to play with it some more. The hardest part is the lack of software directly in the repositories, and the lack of an updated version of Firefox as well (if anyone knows if SUSE is going to move to the latest Firefox ESR, please let me know in the comments).
I’m having fun playing in these new (to me) communities and how they operate. Hopefully I’ll soon have an entire month to do so.