14 DAY TRIAL // openSUSE today announced the official and immediate availability for download of the latest and greatest update to the openSUSE Leap operating system series, version 42.3.
Based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack (SP) 3 enterprise-ready operating system, OpenSuSE Leap 42.3 is at best a hardware enablement release that includes hundreds of updated packages compared to the previous update, in this case openSUSE Leap 42.2, which arrived in mid-November last year.
More than eight months in development, openSUSE Leap 42.3 is finally here as the newest update to the rock-solid Leap distribution, powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series and including lots of well-tested components, but not necessary up to date (see below for details).
"The rock-solid Leap distribution also offers great packages for streaming media, playing games, editing graphics and creating animation, 3D printing projects, worldwide healthcare projects, data extraction, tools for high-performance computing, network monitoring and much more," said openSUSE.
Here's what's new in openSUSE Leap 42.3
Prominent new features of the openSUSE Leap 42.3 release include KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS as default desktop environment, which is accompanied by the GNOME 3.20 desktop as well as other DEs that you can choose from the revamped desktop selection screen of the installer.
openSUSE Leap 42.3 is also a great release for servers, as it ships with a server installation profile and a fully-featured text mode installer, along with Borgmatic's wrapper for the Borg backup solution to automatically backup your data every single day through the systemd 228 service.
The OS now features support for Open-Channel solid state drives (SSDs) through the implementation of the LightNVM full-stack initiative, improves Skylake Windows 8 precision touchpad support, adds support for the Google Fiber TV remote control, as well as for Clustered RAID1 and Journaled RAID5.
There are also numerous improvements for 64-bit ARM architectures, improved support for the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0, additional UEFI 2.5 functionality, better native EXT4 encryption support, VRF (Virtual Routing and Forwarding) support in the IPv6 stack, and completely lockless TCP listener handling.
openSUSE Leap 42.3 provides support for both PHP 5 and PHP 7, comes with an up-to-date graphics stack based on Mesa 17, includes TeX Live 2016, Mozilla Firefox 52 ESR, Mozilla Thunderbird 52, Enlightenment 0.21.8, KDE Applications 17.04.2, KDE Frameworks 5.32.0, LXQt 0.11, CMake 3.5.2, Ruby 2.4, and GNU Health 3.2.
GCC 4.8.5 is the default compiler, but it's possible to compile packages using either the GCC 5, GCC 6, and GCC 7 compilers. The Qt libraries were updated to Qt 5.6.2, which is accompanied by Qt Creator 4.3.0, and AppArmor was updated to version 2.10.2 to provide users with an extra layer of security when using openSUSE Leap.
openSUSE Leap 42.3 is available for download right now as both 64-bit and 32-bit installation images, as well as Raspberry Pi and Cloud images. Existing openSUSE Leap 42.2 users are advised to upgrade to openSUSE Leap 42.3 immediately using the built-in update system.