openSUSE 12.2 Will Bring Plymouth, GRUB2, GCC 4.7

OpenSUSE 12.2 Milestone 2 is available today with several new features as the German-founded Linux distribution prepares for its official release this summer.

Among the work that's going into openSUSE 12.2 is finally integrating the GRUB2 boot-loader, Red Hat's KMS-based Plymouth boot splash-screen has finally found its way into openSUSE, and GCC 4.7 will be the default compiler of this next release.

Seeing GRUB2 and Plymouth in openSUSE was just a matter of time and it's good to see them finally arriving for openSUSE 12.2. With GCC 4.7, there's performance improvements and other great features to look forward to. Fedora 17 will be shipping with GCC 4.7 in May while openSUSE 12.2 in July looks like it will be the second major tier-one distribution using this updated GNU Compiler Collection stack to be released in the coming days. (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is using GCC 4.6.)

One interesting move is that the Razor Qt desktop will likely be available within openSUSE 12.2, alongside GNOME 3.4 Shell and KDE 4.8. There will also be an updated LibreOffice and the usual selection of updated open-source packages for this next major openSUSE release.

The openSUSE ARM team is also hoping their architecture will be well supported with openSUSE 12.2.

More details on the openSUSE 12.2 Milestone 2 release or to give it a whirl, stop by news.opensuse.org.

There's no word at this time whether the OpenSUSE beer will see an expanded beer selection to commemorate the 12.2 release that's set for July.