Portal:15.5

openSUSE 15.5 Release information

Leap 15.5 was released on June 7, 2023. For details check the packaging information and the Roadmap. openSUSE Leap 15.5 offers professional users, entrepreneurs and ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) updated support for modern hardware with improved YaST functionality and an improved installer. Users can expect 18th months (12 + 6) of support.

Leap 15.5 is based on the Portal:Jump concept, where we combine openSUSE Backports with binaries from SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Feature highlights

openSUSE Leap 15.5 is...

Is this highlight too short? See Features_15.5 for more detailed information about planned changes.

Software Craftsmanship

Previous versions of openSUSE Leap did a great job to keep sources alike with SUSE Linux Enterprise, yet different build configurations resulted in various feature sets on both sides of these chameleon distributions. This release of openSUSE Leap goes beyond the previous sources and unifies feature sets and the building of openSUSE Leap on top of binary packages from SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP5. This release makes openSUSE Leap 15.5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP5 fully binary identical.

Seamless migration

The seamless migration experience from Leap to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is practically instantaneous. The pattern changes to migrate to SUSE Linux Enterprise are effortless. Should users of openSUSE Leap have a need to migrate, the option is available and users can be confident in the ability to migrate to enterprise support. More information about how the distributions are built can be found here.

Artificial Intelligence

Many Artificial Intelligence packages are available in Leap 15.5.

PyTorch: Made for both server and compute resources, this machine learning library accelerates power users’ ability to prototype a project and move it to a production deployment.

ONNX: An open format built to represent machine learning models, provides interoperability in the AI tool space. It enables AI developers to use models with a variety of frameworks, tools, runtimes, and compilers.

Booting from NVMe-oF™ over TCP

openSUSE Leap 15.5 provides out-of-the-box support for installing and booting from NVM Express® over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) over the TCP transport according to the NVMe-oF boot specification 1.0. This allows flexible creation and orchestration of diskless clients in SAN environments using the latest NVMe-oF technology. This feature requires support in the system UEFI BIOS, where networking and NVMe-oF targets are configured. The firmware uses this information for booting the kernel. The operating system obtains the configuration information from the firmware and uses it for mounting the root file system over NVMe-oF.

For Users

KDE

Plasma 5.27 LTS is a long-term support release from the KDE Plasma team. Leap 15.5 includes this new LTS version. In Plasma 5.27, massive improvements have been made. A Konqi welcome wizard arrives in the release to provide newcomers with the power of open source software. An example of one of its newest features is the new tiling system which allows users to set up custom tile layouts and resize adjacent tiled windows simultaneously. Activate it in System Settings > Workspace Behavior > Desktop Effects.

GNOME

Leap 15.5 offers GNOME 41. GNOME 41 is the product of 6 months work by the GNOME project. It includes a number of significant improvements, new features, and many enhancements. The most notable changes in this release include an improved Software app, new multitasking settings, and enhanced power management features. With these changes GNOME is smarter, more flexible, and offers a richer and more engaging experience than ever before. The new release also comes with significant improvements for developers, including a new developer documentation website, a major new version of the Human Interface Guidelines, new features in the Builder IDE, GTK 4 enhancements, and much more.

Xfce

The Xfce Desktop in Leap 15.5 is 4.18. Xfce 4.18 introduces new major features. A widget for filename input, XfceFilenameInput, was added to prevent invalid filenames and to give immediate detailed feedback about errors. The Generic Shortcut Editor widget is currently used in Thunar, Xfce Terminal, and Mousepad.

Sway

openSUSE Leap 15.5 contains a tiling Wayland compositor Sway, which is a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11. It works with your existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features, plus a few extras.

Education, Research and Health

The Leap distribution supports the health, science, research, and developer communities with packages like GNU Health, which streamlines the operations of a hospital while collecting vital patient data, and QGIS, which allows researchers to create, edit, visualize, analyze, and publish geospatial information. Grafana and Prometheus are two newly maintained packages that open up new possibilities for analytical experts. Grafana provides end users the ability to create interactive visual analytics. The feature-rich data-modeling packages Graphite, Elastic, and Prometheus give openSUSE users greater latitude to construct, compute, and decipher data more intelligently.

Internationalization

This openSUSE release uses Weblate to coordinate the translation of openSUSE into more than 50 languages. openSUSE’s Weblate interface enables everyone (from dedicated translators to casual contributors) to take part in the process and makes it possible to coordinate the translations of openSUSE with the translations for SUSE Linux Enterprise, boosting collaboration between both community and enterprise.