Archive:15.0/Features
openSUSE Leap 15.0 is...
For the first time, SUSE will support migration from Leap to SLE, which gives system integrators developing on Leap the possibility of moving to an enterprise version for certifications, mass deployments and/or extended Long Term Support. openSUSE Leap 15 brings plenty of community packages built on top of a core from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 sources, which is the first time the two major releases were built from the beginning in parallel. Leap 15 shares a common core with SLE 15, which is due for release in the coming months. The first release of Leap was version 42.1, and it was based on the first Service Pack (SP1) of SLE 12. Three years later SUSE’s enterprise version and openSUSE’s community version are now aligned at 15 with a fresh rebase.
The release has a system role selection that offers a classic server role and a Transactional Server role. Contributed by the Kubic Project, this role uses transactional updates and a Read-Only Root Filesystem to provide Leap with the benefits of atomic updates in a multitude of use cases, including container hosts, Internet of Things (IoT), and classic server functions with potential future applications also involving desktops.
For Developers
openSUSE Leap 15 has multiple packages for containers and containerized applications. Flatpak and AppImage, which is software utility for software deployment, package management, and application virtualization, allow developers to provide users with Linux application that run in isolation from the rest of the system. Docker containers and tooling make building and shipping applications easy and fast. Use the package containerd to run containers according to Open Container Initiative Specifications.
The system compiler for Leap 15 is gcc 7 and more compilers will be added in when Service Packs for Leap 15 are released. GNOME Builder is available for Leap for the first time so develops can build for their favorite GNOME Projects GNOME Builder is offered as a powerful general purpose IDE for not only GTK applications based on C, C++ and Vala, but many other languages in addition. Developers can configure Qt5 settings with Qt5 Configuration Tool or use Qt Widgets for scales, sliders, dials, compasses, thermometers, wheels and knobs to control or display values, arrays, and more. Developers can also create more graphical user interfaces with a solid & stable toolkit for building gtk based applications through GTK 3.22.30.
Leap offers about every programming language a developer can choose. Go, Rust, Haskell, C++, Ruby on Rails, Java, Python, Perl and more. Leap also has multiple libraries for developers' needs like libzypp, libvirt, glib, libstorage-ng and more. Build shared libraries with libvirt, use the set of shell scripts in libtool-testsuite or use glib as a general-purpose utility library for data types, macros, type conversions, string utilities, file utilities, a main loop abstraction, and more.
For Sysadmins
System Administrators and small businesses can use Leap for hosting web and mail servers. Sysadmins can take full advantage of the network management protocol Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), allocate resources of the Domain Name System (DNS) or offer client computers access files over a Network File System (NFS). File and host sharing packages like NextCloud are also available and the groupware application suite Kopano is part of the official Leap 15 release. Existing Leap users should find updating to Leap 15 seamless and should consider planning their migration. It is also worth remembering that openSUSE Leap uses Delta RPMs for all maintenance updates, ensuring that the long term bandwidth requirements for maintaining your Leap system are as small as possible.
The new changes to YaST, the installer and boot theme are immaculate and weed out some of the past limitations with YaST in previous openSUSE versions. The improved libstorage-ng makes the partitioner more powerful and more reliable. The YaST partitioner has always been known for being very powerful, but libstorage-ng takes it to a new level. This release of Leap has a new firewall solution. Changes were made to move from SuSEfirewall2 to the firewall management tool FirewallD, which is very interactive and powerful.
openSUSE Leap is built better than other distributions and is the most tested Linux distribution on the planet. Leap is built using a secure development model. The community distribution with an enterprise base system is developed in cooperation with SUSE developers using several open source and openSUSE tools like the Open Build Service and openQA, which has run more than a million test runs. The vibrant developer community, the availability of the open-source tools and the distribution alignment between Leap and SLE make it easy for developers to contribute to Leap and further drive technological innovations and open-source solutions. Leap can be used as a Virtual Machine (VM) guest or container guest, which allows professionals to efficiently run chosen network services no matter whether it’s a single server or a data center; Leap is built to scale.
For Users
KDE’s latest offering, which is also available for SLE 15 through PackageHub, uses the latest Plasma 5.12 Long-Term-Support version and all its community supported tools and applications. Leap offers the return of Live Images for KDE.
Users of openSUSE Leap can choose their favorite desktop environment, configuration and setup. The GNOME version in Leap is the same as the version used in SLE 15, which now uses Wayland by default. GNOME Builder is available for Leap for the first time, so GNOME enthusiasts can develop for their favorite GNOME Projects. Leap offers the return of Live Images for GNOME.
The Leap distribution supports the health, science, research and developer communities with packages like GNU Health, which can help facilitate running the operations of a hospital and collecting vital patient data, and QGIS, which allows researchers to create, edit, visualise, analyse and publish geospatial information.
This openSUSE releases use 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 ones for SUSE Enterprise Linux, boosting collaboration between community and enterprise.