I am delighted to see openSUSE 13.1 ‘gone wild’ and the release done.
It has been a turbulent time in the last few months:

  • A lot of contributors met in Greece for the yearly face-to-face conference, as usual loaded with interesting talks (which I happen to miss more often than attend; I mostly participate in ‘corridor-talks’)
  • A Beta Pizza Hackathon, uniting people (virtually) to ensure the most of the bugs get some attention.
  • A great release of openSUSE 13.1

If you did not do so yet, be sure to check out Sneak peek – openSUSE 13.1 – What we have for GNOME users.

As openSUSE 13.1 has been released it’s time to reflect on the time past:
From a GNOME Perspective i feel we did about everything right that we could do right. The team managed to squeeze GNOME 3.10.1 into the release, despite the tight timelines. Looking at the current list of reported bugs still open against GNOME (I hope I don’t miss too many in my overview), I am also happy to announce that GNOME 3.10.2 is currently prepared to go out as an online update. There are some minor tweaks here and there that will help even further in you having a great experience using openSUSE 13.1.

In my ‘defacto’ role as GNOME Team leader, I am really thrilled in having seen various new ‘faces’ (well, nick names) on IRC and in bugzilla during the last few months. Everybody was reporting bugs, discussing odd behaviors, asking for help and re-testing proposed fixes.
The more people we have that are willing to take their chances, report some bugs and spend time with the team, following up on questions the higher the chance to find more bugs. Really cool stuff. And you should really join the channel: you will realize fast that it’s not just a channel around openSUSE GNOME, but there is no one afraid pulling a joke, or having a short discussion about anything else (mind though: the topic of the channel IS openSUSE GNOME, so in some rare cases people are asked to discuss a topic in private or a different channel).

Reporting issues
So, despite our hard work, you think you found a bug? Don’t worry: this is (unfortunately) not unlikely at all. Various people tested the system so far in a number of configurations and combinations; but I’m almost certain nobody did what you did or are planning to do. So on the odd chance that you DO run into a bug, please feel free to report it. The various options are:

  • Contact us on IRC (irc.freenode.org) in the channel #opensuse-gnome (depending on day and time, and seasonal, a response might not be immediate)
  • Send an email to opensuse-gnome [at] opensuse.org with your questions and findings so far
  • Report a bug in bugzilla.gnome.org (See Submitting bug reports)

Even in case you chose for IRC and mail, if the conclusion is that you DO really hit a bug, you are likely still asked to report it, as it makes it easier for us to follow up. There is only a handful of us working on this (and be assured, we already started on openSUSE 13.2 as well), so we need to balance the time a bit.

I assume you’re still reading here because the download of openSUSE 13.1 did not yet finish, right?