"Free software marches along at a rapid pace, developing new and better software. Distributions are often contributing along the way and are hot on the heels of these projects to package it all up for us lowly end users.
"The much anticipated Debian 5.0 ‘Lenny’ release was expected to be released in 2008, but actually arrived in February this year. The project also announced an official GNU/kFreeBSD port, which is due next year. Ubuntu continued down their path of improving the user experience by introducing their one hundred paper cuts project.
"In light of some layoffs at Novell, board Members Pascal Bleser and Bryen Yunashko released a joint statement on the future of openSUSE. Later the project also opened up their development to the community and Novell dedicated a team of 10 employees to the work.
"openSUSE also went through many other core changes this past year, including the switch to an unusual 8 month release schedule. Their recent 11.2 release has been well received and their earlier 11.1 release was the first to be built entirely using their online build service. The distro also gained the ability to upgrade between distributions using the Zypper package manager."
