Softpedia is being informed by openSUSE Chairman Richard Brown that the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment announced officially on September 21, 2016, is now available for installation in openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Today, September 22, 2016, the openSUSE Project proudly announced the release and immediate availability for download of the second Beta development milestone towards the openSUSE Leap 42.2 operating system.

openSUSE Leap 42.2 Beta 2 comes with several interesting improvements and up-to-date software components, including the KDE Applications 16.08.0, KDE Frameworks 5.26.0, GStreamer 1.8.3, GTK+ 2.24.31, GTK+ 3.20.9, json-glib 1.2.2, Wireshark 2.2.0, and Xen 4.7.0_12.

Other than that, the openSUSE KDE team did a fantastic job of integrating the recently announced Beta release of the KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment into openSUSE Leap 42.2 Beta 2 so you can get an early taste and see if there are any show stoppers that need to be addressed before the final version lands in mid-November.

Also: New Leap Beta Adds Plasma 5.8 Beta

The first snapshots for the month of September have been released for the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system, and Douglas DeMaio is here again to report on the freshly added software versions.

While distribution-hopping is common among newcomers to Linux, longtime users tend to settle into a distribution they like and stay put thereafter. In the end, Linux distributions are more alike than different, and one's time is better spent getting real work done rather than looking for a shinier version of the operating system. Your editor, however, somehow never got that memo; that's what comes from ignoring Twitter, perhaps. So there is a new distribution on the main desktop machine; this time around it's openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Most rational users simply want a desktop system that works, is secure, and, hopefully, isn't too badly out of date. Tumbleweed is not intended for those users; instead, it is good for people who like to be on the leading edge with current versions of everything and who are not afraid of occasional breakage. It's for users who like an occasional surprise from their operating system. That sounds like just the sort of distribution your editor actively seeks out.

More to the point, Tumbleweed is a rolling distribution; rather than make regular releases that are months or years apart, the Tumbleweed developers update packages individually as new releases come out upstream. Unlike development distributions like Rawhide, Tumbleweed does not contain pre-release software. By waiting to ship a release until it has been declared stable upstream, Tumbleweed should be able to avoid the worst unpleasant surprises while keeping up with what the development community is doing.