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:

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.

More here