Though it’s not intended for production use, of course, you can get a taste of this one yourself by downloading it from the project site. In the meantime, here are five key highlights.
1. ‘Secure Boot’ support
“It should be possible to install openSUSE 12.3 on a UEFI machine without problems,” Poortvliet wrote, noting that the project team has been working hard on accommodating the Secure Boot technology enabled in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) on Windows 8 hardware, which requires an appropriate digital signature before an operating system is allowed to boot.
“The good news is that openSUSE 12.3 RC2 can boot perfectly with Secure Boot enabled in our UEFI firmware,” he added.
Currently, in this second release candidate, doing so requires an extra manual action by the user, but that will be fixed before the final version arrives, Poortvliet said.