It's officially out: go grab openSUSE 11.0! You can also use the web interface to help you choose what to download and how to download it.

I'm quite new to the openSUSE world but I've seen great progress in the last six months and I'm definitely happy with the work that is going on in the GNOME team. There are many reasons for that:

• many people are willing to help (and when I say many, it also means more and more) in the openSUSE-GNOME community and so useful things get actually done :-) I'm quite confident that we'll have even more contributions in the future thanks to the new collaboration features of the build service.
• there's an ongoing effort to reduce our number of patches: we want to be good upstream citizen and keeping patches can only hurt us in the long term anyway (they require maintenance, after all). This means we're reviewing all of our patches by making sure they have been sent upstream, and dropping them when we consider they're not worth the effort.
• most (I don't dare saying all, but maybe I should) of the development we're doing is being done upstream. Did I mention we want to be good upstream citizen?
• with all this upstream orientation, you could get the feeling that we're not doing anything useful inside the distribution. But we want to get everything polished and well-integrated with the rest of the distribution, and I hope people will agree we're not doing bad in this area.
• oh, and the people are so great. I won't try to describe howcrazy good the atmosphere is -- just join the IRC channel or the list!

The summary could read: great people, upstream work and awesome result.

I wanted to do quite a few things to celebrate this release, but I unfortunately lost my internet connectivity at home, which makes me quite less productive (but it might be good to help cure the addiction ;-)). Anyway, I'll keep those (not so) secret ideas for the next release! Because, you know, I've the feeling that 11.0 was only first step and 11.1 will get some pure love :-)