The third of seven scheduled milestone releases for 11.3 was completed and released on schedule. Milestone 3 focuses on using GCC 4.5 as the default compiler, leaving a great deal of the work in the hands of the openSUSE Build Service after a few issues (such as kernel panics) were resolved.

Here’s what you may find interesting in the new release:
A bug in Milestone 2 prevented mounting of encrypted home folders. This has been resolved.
zypper can now interrupt PackageKit, via dbus, eliminating a major annoyance during updates and additional installs.
A Milestone 1 issue with starting xorg on i915 hardware has finally been resolved.
Pam mount has been updated to the current version, as the version used prior is “unsupported”. There are, apparently, some config file changes to be aware of.

Gnome/GTK desktop users:
Qt has been removed from the Gnome Live CD, clearing room to potentially add some more apps. Sax2 was removed in the process, because it has been mostly deprecated by xorg’s much-improved auto detection.
epdfview, a pdf viewer akin to evince but without any gnome-lib dependencies, is now included.

KDE desktop users:
The network-manager applet has gotten a usability update, in the form of an updated icon set.

Kernel hackers:
Crash, the core dump analyzer, is now at version 5.0.1.

Perl developers:
Dozens of libraries have been incrementally updated along with the core update to 5.10.1.

Distribution/Appliance builders:
Kiwi no longer has mandatory dependencies on openSUSE-branded packages.

Grub2 is now included, although there are currently no plans to use it by default.