SUSE Linux used to be a very KDE-centric distribution. Then Novell came around, bought SUSE and Ximian, and slowely but surely they turned the now-openSUSE distribution into effectively a GNOME-centric distribution with KDE as its sidekick. The openSUSE community, however, doesn't appear to be particularly happy with KDE being a sidekick.

The choice of a Linux desktop environment, typically between the "big two": GNOME and KDE, is one that inspires enthusiastic advocacy—some might even say religious fervor—among the supporters of each choice.

Another distribution to release recently is OpenSuSE 11.2. OpenSuSE serves as the base for Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. In some ways, it's to SuSE what Fedora is to Red Hat. But unlike Fedora, OpenSuSE doesn't live on the bleeding edge.

The most popular feature in openFATE (at least of this writing) is a proposal from KDE e.V. member Frank Karlitschek to make KDE the “default” in openSUSE. Michael Loeffler has also blogged about this and put it on the opensuse-project mailing list.

openSUSE is a commercially-backed Open Source Linux distribution with origins in Germany. Novell bought SuSE in November 2004 and has been releasing a freely downloadable community-based Linux desktop since August 2005.

openSUSE is a free, open project. Although Novell sponsors it heavily, the project belongs to the openSUSE community. Things were not always this way; before Novell's acquisition of SuSE, SuSE internally managed the course of the distribution, with little input or participation from the user community.

openSUSE and SUSE Linux sets default values for some of the network related Kernel parameters. With Kernel 2.6 (default in recent releases of openSUSE & SuSE Linux), there are some fine tuning you can do to improve Network performance and get that extra out of your system.

A whole series of changes awaits users in openSUSE 11.2, including Ext4 as the default file system, boot loader Grub2 and a big move towards the KDE 4 desktop.

Need something to play with over the weekend? The OpenSUSE 11.3 release is the first ever to include the OpenSUSE LXDE flavor. LXDE version 0.5.5 is included on the OpenSUSE DVD along with other desktop options KDE, GNOME, and XFCE.