Powered by the Linux 4.12 kernel with enterprise patches

May 25, 2018 10:42 GMT  ·  By

The openSUSE Project released today that openSUSE Leap 15 operating system, which is based on the upcoming SUSE Enterprise Linux 15 series and features updated components and technologies designed for power users.

Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15, the OpenSuSE Leap 15 operating system comes with all the enterprise features power users and IT professionals need, including the ability to migrate openSUSE Leap 15 installations to SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 when it's out later this year. This gives system integrators and administrators the long-term support, certifications, and mass deployments offerings of an enterprise OS.

"Today’s major release of openSUSE Leap 15 is offering professional users, entrepreneurs and ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) a new, fresh and hardened code base for their workloads that supports modern hardware, based on a stable, community- and enterprise-based open-source GNU/Linux distribution – but developed with a modern, more secure, better tested and much more open open-source build system unique to SUSE and openSUSE," said openSUSE Project's Douglas DeMaio.

Highlights of openSUSE Leap 15

Major highlights of the openSUSE Leap 15 operating system include a new partitioner implemented in the installer, integration with the Kopano open-source groupware application suite, Firewalld as the default firewall management tool, a new classic "server" and "transactional server" system roles with read-only root filesystem and transactional updates, cloud optimizations, and a brand-new look that's been closely aligned with SUSE Linux Enterprise.

openSUSE Leap 15 also improves the YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) and AutoYaST system setup and configuration tools, and updates various of its components to new releases. Among these, we can mention the Linux 4.12 kernel, KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS and GNOME 3.26 desktop environments, LibreOffice 6.0 office suite, Mozilla Firefox 60 web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird 52 email and news client, VLC 3.0 media player, OpenSSL 1.1.0, PHP 7, and systemd 234.

Existing openSUSE Leap users can now update to the openSUSE Leap 15 release, but for new deployments, you'll have to download the openSUSE Leap 15 installation images. openSUSE Leap 15 works only with 64-bit (x86_64) hardware architectures, but support for the ARM64 (AArch64) and POWER architectures is expected soon. The openSUSE Leap 15 series will be maintained with security updates for the next three years.