The people at the OpenSUSE project are so excited about their recent 11.0 release, they're ready to share the love with a lucky Download Squad reader! And it's not that garden variety elementary school crush sort of love, either. It's the bona fide, dyed in the wool, hand-holding sort of love, complete with instruction manuals, quick start guides and 90 days of end-user installation support bliss!

The OpenSUSE 11.0 boxed version is especially nice for new users, not only because of the support and great manuals, but because it has every iteration of OpenSUSE 11.0 you could ever imagine. Need the x86 version? There it is! Got a 64 bit processor and a ridiculous amount of RAM to support? Hey, the 64 bit version's there too!

There's the usual Linux suspects, too, of course: KDE, GNOME, Xfce, OpenOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Amarok, firewall software, and AppArmor. But lest your heart become overwhelmed, there are a few hoops you have to jump through to get up close and personal with the OpenSUSE 11.0 box set of love.

In order to win the OpenSUSE 11.0 team's heart (or at least the fruits of their labor):

• Open to legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older
• Leave a comment on this post and tell us what you like best about free speech and/or free beer (and keep in mind that our moms visit this site, so go easy on the free speech concerning the free beer, okay?)
• Contest is open until 11:59 pm Eastern Time, June 26, 2008
• You may enter once.
  
• One winner will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prize is one boxed copy of OpenSUSE 11.0, including manuals and 90 days of end-user installation support. (valued at $60)
• Click here for complete official rules.

OpenSUSE has always been an odd sort of Linux distribution. It's always been reasonably user friendly, very stable, and quite nicely pulled off the not-so-easy task of being good for new users while offering advanced and power users the flexibility and freedom they require.

Yet OpenSUSE often gets a bad wrap. There's that whole Novell/Microsoft/the world is ending conspiracy thing going on, for one thing. Certainly when Novell bought SuSE, it was disturbing. What were Novell's intentions? Where were things going to go from this point? Was openSUSE going to suffer for it?

Suffer? We probably wouldn't go as far as to say that. Were the changes and improvements to the distribution immediately after Novell took the helm earth-shaking? No, not particularly. They were modest, and worked well enough, but nothing that seemed leaps and bounds beyond the previous versions.

Nothing seemed leaps and bounds beyond -- until now. Today, OpenSUSE officially rolled out the 11.0 release. OpenSUSE seems to have scrutinized itself, from the kernel to the community. The developers pushed away from what seemed like an "adapt to survive" mode, and rolled out a release with changes so dramatic and beautiful that the distribution's chameleon ("geeko") mascot seems less cute and instead genuinely fitting.

If we had one word, and only one word to use to describe OpenSUSE 11.0, it would be this:

Fast.

Yes, dear readers. We just used the word "fast" (boldface, even) in relation to an OpenSUSE release. It starts and runs applications quickly, and we can say completely honestly, it installs quickly. We aren't just talking system updates and "here and there" YaST additions. No... You can boot the liveCD and have a complete OpenSUSE 11.0 system on your hard drive in what seems even slightly less time than an Ubuntu install.