Seems for the next release they are going to drop the development cycle down to 6 months vs the regular 8 month plan.
The public release of openSUSE 11.1 is scheduled for December 18, 2008, six months after the release of openSUSE 11.0. The full schedule for the release cycle is as follows:

  • Thu, Jul 24: openSUSE 11.1 Alpha1
  • Thu, Aug 21: openSUSE 11.1 Alpha2
  • Thu, Sep 18: openSUSE 11.1 Beta1 - snapshot release
  • Thu, Oct 02: openSUSE 11.1 Beta2 - snapshot release
  • Thu, Oct 16: openSUSE 11.1 Beta3 - snapshot release
  • Thu, Oct 30: openSUSE 11.1 Beta4 - snapshot release
  • Thu, Nov 13: openSUSE 11.1 RC1 - snapshot release
  • Thu, Nov 27: openSUSE 11.1 RC2 - snapshot release
  • Thu, Dec 4: openSUSE 11.1 GM - final release
  • Thu, Dec 18 openSUSE 11.1 public release

This is, of course, a tentative schedule. Any critical or show-stopping bugs may delay betas and release candidates.
Major areas of interest in this release include:

  • GNOME 2.24
  • KDE: KDE 4.1.1 (optionally KDE 3.5.10)
  • Continued improvement in the software update stack
  • Linux kernel 2.6.27+