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The openSUSE 13.2 launch will be ready this November and the developers are preparing to merge the Tumbleweed and the Factory rolling releases into one, under the name of Tumbleweed.

The openSUSE developers have changed the release cycle and they now have more time from one version to another. This is the main reason why openSUSE 13.2 is set to arrive in November. Now, the two development branches for this distribution have been integrated into a single one and the result promises to be much better and stable version.

Now, with the final version knocking at the door, it didn't made sense anymore to have two branches, and the best way to serve the users was to have them combined in a single one. What's more interesting is the fact that the Tumbleweed branch was started by Greg Kroah-Hartman, who is better known for this work as a kernel developed and maintainer.

How does this merge affects the end user?

The bottom line is that the merge between the two branches won't have real impact on what the regular user will see and experience. It's good thing for the distribution in general and it should provide the final OS with a faster and better experience.

"With the release of openSUSE 13.2 due in November, we realised this was a perfect opportunity to merge our two openSUSE rolling-releases
together so users of Tumbleweed can benefit from the developments to our Factory development process over the last few years. The combined feedback and contributions from our combined Tumbleweed and Factory users should help keep openSUSE rolling forward even faster, while offering our users the latest and greatest applications on a stable rolling release," said Richard Brown, Chairman of openSUSE board.

"The changes to the Factory release model have changed it from being an unstable development codebase into the type of rolling release I set out to create when starting openSUSE Tumbleweed," also noted said Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux Kernel Developer and creator of openSUSE Tumbleweed.

The openSUSE will make a real effort for this upcoming release and it will integrate some of the latest packages, including GNOME 3.14, the KDE 4.14.x branch, Linux kernel 3.17 (which is already out and with a first update), a testing version of the Plasma 5 release, LibreOffice 4.3.12, and a few other packages.

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