Mozilla Firefox 49.0 is now the default web browser

Oct 5, 2016 21:15 GMT  ·  By

Today, October 5, 2016, the openSUSE Leap development team announced the availability of the third and last Beta snapshot for the upcoming openSUSE Leap 42.2 operating system, due for release in mid-November.

openSUSE Leap 42.2 Beta 3 comes only two weeks after the release of the second Beta build, but it includes a lot of goodies that Tumbleweed users are already enjoying on their personal computers. First off, it ships with the recently released KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment, if you're a fan of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop.

"Plasma 5.8 is new but the purpose of OpenSuSE Leap is to have well-established packages and since Plasma 5.8 is a Long Term Support release, it made sense to have 5.8 in the distribution event though it is very new," says Douglas DeMaio in today's announcement. "Plasma 5.8 will be supported for 18 months, according to KDE’s release team."

Now featuring KDE Applications 16.08.1 and Mozilla Firefox 49.0

Making a rock-solid and stable GNU/Linux distribution doesn't mean that you have to ship an older version of an open source software project just because it was thoroughly tested for many months in real-world environments and it doesn't crash, guaranteed. openSUSE Leap's design goal is to offer a very stable and reliable OS, but it comes with recent technologies.

For example, the Beta 3 milestone ships with the latest Mozilla Firefox 49.0 as default web browser, and users can also install a recent release of the VirtualBox virtualization software, version 5.1.4. Moreover, for KDE users, openSUSE Leap 42.2 Beta 3 now integrates the KDE Applications 16.08.1 software suite with all new and shiny KDE apps.

Mozilla Thunderbird 45.3.0 email and news client is available as well in the third Beta release of openSUSE Leap 42.2, which is available for download right now, along with up-to-date versions of many other core components, including YaST, Ruby, libinput, libzypp, and libstorage. Also, the distro is fully in sync with the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Service Pack 2 repositories.

The development cycle of openSUSE Leap 42.2 will continue with two Release Candidate (RC) versions. The first one should arrive on October 18, and will be followed two weeks later by the second one, on November 2. The final release of openSUSE 42.2 is hitting the streets on November 16, 2016. Until then, please test the Beta 3 and report any bugs you might encounter.