After months of work, openSUSE 11.1 is now available. It's of course full of coolness inside, so you know you want to try it! Yep, go download it!

What's interesting about this openSUSE release, and what gets me really excited, is that it's the first release that has been mainly developed with the build service, which also means that we started growing our developer community for real! To put it simply, if there's something that you don't like in a openSUSE package, you can fix it: it's now trivial for everybody to submit an update.

And of course we're already planning the 11.2 development: there's a lively discussion around the 11.2 schedule, and I'm really happy to see the community jump in to give feedback there. Exciting times!

Every year, in December, you start seeing a lot of articles about the big events that occurred during the year, or about delivering awards for the best whatever of the year. And when I say a lot, I think I'm underestimating the amount of those articles. Some are interesting, some are meaningful, a few are both interesting and meaningful, probably most are neither interesting nor meaningful. So when Magnus gave a link saying that openSUSE was distro of the year, I wasn't sure what to expect. It turned out to be a good surprise.

Ars Technica chose two distributions as distros of the year: Foresight and openSUSE. I honestly can't say that the choice is good or bad -- all major distros are making great progress, because they all benefit from what the various upstream projects are doing. While openSUSE is now close to my heart, I'm still fond of Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu. That's probably because I'm still very much upstream-centric in my way of looking at the free software world (and hopefully, I'll stay this way). I could probably write stuff about each distribution, telling you a few things that happened there that were great, or why I like them. But let's focus on Foresight and openSUSE.

So yeah, it's good to see openSUSE picked up as one of the distributions of the year by Ars Technica, but I wouldn't usually care much about this -- nearly everybody has its own favorite distribution because it's the best out there (always funny to see that there are more than one best distribution ;-)). However in this case, the way the project evolved during the last year was considered and that's what kept my attention; I'm really glad to see that outside people are noticing that the openSUSE community is growing, with the development being more and more open; the openSUSE distribution certainly has many qualities, but this point is the most important change for the project. At least, that's my opinion. Sure, there are still tons of things to fix in the community and in the way we develop stuff, but we're getting there. And I feel a huge difference in the openSUSE project between what it was at the beginning of the year and what it is today.

It's also great to see the work done on Foresight noticed. What I really like about Foresight is that they provide GNOME with live media for stable releases, and they do that really quickly. That's simply awesome, no need to argue. As far as I know, they're also trying to not do a lot of changes compared to upstream, so you get an upstream experience. And I love that.

But in the end, I really liked the article because it was useful to me. Really. Let me tell you why. It helped me identify a goal for next year: try to get everyone to spell out openSUSE the correct way (hint: it's not OpenSUSE, nor openSuSE, nor OpenSuSE, nor...). Yeah, after the GNOME vs Gnome war, I had to find a new spelling war ;-)