openSUSE 12.1 With Btrfs, GNOME 3.2, Systemd & So on

OpenSUSE developer community has released ver12.1. openSUSE 12.1 Beta (Asparagus) was also released earlier in this year.  At first glance, openSUSE 12.1 is pretty much in line with recent releases from Fedora and Ubuntu: GNOME 3.2, KDE 4.7, Kernel 3.1, systemd, etc. But a closer look starts to reveal some real divergence between the various Linux offerings today. For example, while Fedora 16 allows you to choose btrfs for your filesystem, openSUSE 12.1 uses btrfs by default. There’s a number of other interesting advancements packed in this release, too.
The filesystem features provided by btrfs are enhanced on openSUSE 12.1 with Snapper, a user-space utility to take, compare, and revert snapshots of files. This has huge potential to make life better for users. It certainly won’t eliminate the need for backups, but it’s a strong step in the right direction. Similarly, openSUSE 12.1 includes support for ownCloud, “slim yet powerful private cloud software”. Again, this isn’t going to eliminate Dropbox or similar services, but it’s a step in the right direction toward self-sufficiency for regular end users in the Free Software space.

The update to openSUSE is also the first to incorporate a new release numbering system; the previous release was openSUSE 11.4. From 12.1 onward, the 8 month release cycle will see a x.1 release in November, an x.2 release in July and a x.3 release in March when the cycle starts over again. So, the future releases of openSUSE will be 12.2 in July 2012, 12.3 in March 2013 and 13.1 in November 2013.

To Download openSUSE 12.1 Click Here