openSUSE 12.3

KDE 4.10

3.7 kernel

libreoffice 3.6.5

x.org 1.14

Installed openSUSE 12.3 on the 32-bit PC + old 64-bit PC.  KDE 4.10 runs slightly faster than KDE 4.6 on 32-bit, because the footprint is somewhat lower. The applications like Libreoffice speed up once opened on 32-bit. Installing VLC also installs codec fo Amarok.   

1.      The Ext4 filesystem now supports big allocation blocks (e.g. 1, 2, 3). The technique, known as bigalloc, bundles the 4K blocks used to store data into clusters of up to 1 MB. This reduces administrative overhead when saving large files and should significantly improve performance in some scenarios.
2.     The kernel developers have extended the TCP stack of Linux 3.2 to provide "Proportional Rate Reduction" (PRR) support.
3. A number of changes in Linux 3.3 are intended to take care of various problems that can, in certain situations, cause systems to temporarily stall when the kernel is writing large amounts of data to a slow disk (such as a USB flash drive)
4. The new code also allows this kind of migration to be paused, cancelled and restarted after a crash. The Ext4 code gained a new mechanism for resizing Ext4 filesystems
5. From Linux 3.4, kernels that are compiled for x86-64/x64 processors can offer an "x32" ABI (Application Binary Interface) to programs (1 and others). Programs compiled for this ABI can access the 64-bit registers and data paths of 64-bit processors
6. Linux 3.5 eliminates the cause of the latest leap second bug which affected many systems earlier this month. A major development by Eric W. Biederman, "User namespace enhancements" makes possible a cleaner separation of user and group IDs between host and container. As a result, users who have root privileges in a container no longer, for example, have full access to all files in the directories /proc/ and /sys/.
7.  Ext4 can now add CRC32 checksums to many parts of its metadata and use them to reveal corruptions
8. The teaming driver that was integrated in Linux 3.3 now offers a load balancing feature
9. With Linux 3.6 the ext4 code no longer stores quota information in visible files, but instead stores it in the form of hidden inodes in the metadata.
10. Device mapper is now able to utilise the RAID 10 functionality provided by the MD subsystem.
11. the kernel can now be configured to not follow hardlinks and softlinks in directories with a set "sticky" bit (such as /tmp/), when those links point somewhere higher up the directory tree. As LWN.net explains in this article, this feature, which can be activated via sysctl, puts a stop to a common trick used by attackers to escalate their privileges by using background services running as root.