A lot has been happening on the KDE side of openSUSE… this post summarizes what’s been going on so far. Live media for Plasma 5 One of the most-often requested ways to test Plasma 5, given it can’t be coinstalled with the 4.x Workspace, is the availability of live images to test either in VM or bare metal without touching existing systems. Given that other distributions started doing so since a while, naturally openSUSE couldn’t stay still.

KDE released the second beta of the KDE Platform, Workspaces and Applications 4.11, and after the necessary time for the OBS to build packages from the released tarballs, packages are available for openSUSE 12.3 and openSUSE Factory. Like the previous beta, they are available through the KDE:Distro:Factory repository. 4.11.x is is targeted for inclusion in the upcoming openSUSE 13.1. So far 4.11 has been pretty stable for me, but you should never forget these packages are for testing and bug reporting purposes: don’t use them on production systems.

Since KDE has released the first beta of Platform, Workspaces, and Applications 4.11, there will be some changes in the packages offered in the openSUSE repositories. In short: KDE:Distro:Factory will now start tracking 4.11 betas and RCs: packages are being worked on. Use this version to test packages and to report bugs upstream. KDE:Release:410 has been decoupled from KDE:Distro:Factory. If you were using 4.10 packages from KDF, you’re highly encouraged to move to this repository.