openSUSE Leap 15.5 has officially been released. SUSE’s community distribution is sticking to its own release plan and is largely completely overhauled a year after the release of openSUSE Leap 15.4. Above all, updates to individual components across all areas of application can be found in the release notes, so that both desktop users and server administrators benefit. SUSE has also made many improvements to the substructure of the distribution.
In Leap 15.5, the system is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5 (SLE), with which the new Leap version is binary compatible. At the time of release, it comes with a 5.14.21 kernel, which is essentially 18 months old. As usual, the manufacturer enriches the kernel with a number of backported patches from later kernel versions and its own “Magic Sauce”. Reliable statements as to whether a certain piece of hardware works well with the driver contained in the SLE core or not can therefore hardly be made in a meaningful way. However, Leap 15.5 should not pose any major problems for newer hardware in particular.
openSUSE Leap: Large desktops in new versions
Anyone who uses openSUSE Leap 15.5 on desktops will be happy about extensively renovated versions of the common large desktop environments. Gnome 41 is included with the distribution, as is Xfce 4.18 and KDE Plasma 5.27, an LTS version. If you like it a bit more exotic, you can get Sway as a tiling window compositor and drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager.
The developers have updated end-user software, for example from the multimedia sector, such as VLC or Amarok, as well as classic desktop programs such as Chrome, Firefox and Thunderbird. Version 7.2.5 of the LibreOffice office suite is state-of-the-art. Added to this are updates of useful system tools such as Tillix, a terminal emulator for GNOME still based on GTK 3, which is compatible with the GNOME project’s Human Interface Guidelines, which have also been updated.
Server and desktop systems benefit equally from changes under the hood. Systemd version 249.10 comes with a number of bug fixes, the same applies to the new versions of AppArmor, the Dnf package manager and the CUPS printing system.
Various updates for scripting and programming languages are aimed more at developers. Current variants are now Go 1.17 as well as Python in versions 3.9, 3.10, 3.11 and the standard version 3.6. Perl 5.26.1 and Ruby 2.5 are also included. The developers have also brought Rust up to date with the latest technology.
Server: Updates & more AI
A number of updates on the topic of containers are aimed in particular at server administrators. In the form of Podman 4.4.4, CRI-O 1.22.0 and Containerd 1.6.19, Leap 15.5 comes with three runtime environments for Linux containers in updated versions. Once again, the provider underlines its ambitions to establish Leap as a platform for the operation of modern server applications – especially for those who do not want to put any money on the table for commercial SLE.
Leap 15.5 also makes good ground when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI): In the form of ONNX 1.6, the distribution comes with a comprehensive tool that supports the developers of AI applications in their work. Grafana as a data visualizer and Prometheus as a time series database are in the same line. Both tools provide valuable services when working in the AI environment.
Shut up, the last one – or maybe not
SUSE initially planned to make openSUSE Leap 15.5 the last version of the distribution based on the current technical basis. The company has been developing the internal ALP project for some time, which is likely to become the new basis for SLE. SUSE has already ruled out maintaining the old technical basis from Leap. However, a day before the release of openSUSE Leap 15.5 came the Announcement after which SUSE dedicated to the development of another version with the version number 15.6 with the previous technical basis.
There is therefore no immediate need for action for Leap users. SUSE has also announced that openSUSE Leap 15.5 will continue to provide security updates together with SLE for a while. At the time, this possibility was one of the main motivations for the provider to put Leap on the technical foundation of SLE. In the long term, however, Leap fans will in all likelihood have to choose between switching to the largely container-based ALP (or a Leap based on it) or looking for another distribution. According to current plans, however, they still have time until the end of 2025.
openSUSE Leap 15.5 is available as an installation image on the openSUSE website for download ready. Anyone already running a system with Leap 15.4 can update it directly using the distribution’s update functions.
The current state of the most important Unix and Linux distributions:
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