Lifetime

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openSUSE Leap, the new Regular Release, brings with it a new lifetime.

Leap Major Release (15.x) extends maintenance and support until a successor. At present, a successor has not been declared; Leap 15's lifecycle fully aligns with SUSE Linux Enterprise. There is a projection as of March 2021 that Leap 15 will extend to Leap 15.5. The previous major version of Leap, 42, was supported for more than 36 months, while the current major version of Leap, 15, would then have up to 72 months of support (12x6).

A Leap Minor Release (42.3, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, etc.) is expected to be released annually. Users are expected to upgrade to the latest minor release within 6 months of its availability, leading to a maintenance life cycle of 18 months for each minor release. Since the roadmap of the Leap 15 successor is not known yet, as of now we can't say if the very last Leap 15.X release will have the extended 6 months overlap or not.

openSUSE Leap

openSUSE Leap is the name for openSUSE's regular releases, which were previously known as just 'openSUSE' for versions 13.2 and earlier.

During the lifetime of Leap, you receive:

  • security updates for all included packages
  • critical bugfix updates (usually these are found and fixed in the first few months of its lifetime)

The following distributions are expected to receive updates until the specified date:

openSUSE Tumbleweed

openSUSE Tumbleweed is a rolling release which has a lifetime of 'forever'1, assuming you are running the latest updated packages.

It receives security updates, bug fixes and new features (most often as new software versions) as soon as they are integrated and tested by the openSUSE community.

Critical security updates for packages may also be provided in situations where new software versions may not yet address major security issues.

1: Given the declining usage of i586 devices, there have been discussions over whether or not to drop support for Tumbleweed i586 . While there is no concrete plan to drop i586 support now, do note this may change in the future. Also 32-bit Tumbleweed requires [i686 + SSE2].

openSUSE BCI

openSUSE BCI is a growing set of base, development and application containers built out of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling release. As such, it has the same lifecycle characteristics as openSUSE Tumbleweed, i.e, it has a lifetime of ‘forever’, assuming you are running the latest updated containers. However, containers can appear and disappear at any time, alongside of the development of the rolling Tumbleweed distribution.

It receives security updates, bug fixes and new features (most often as new software versions) as soon as they are integrated and tested by the openSUSE community. Critical security updates for packages may also be provided in situations where new software versions may not yet address major security issues.

openSUSE Leap Micro

openSUSE Leap Micro is released twice a year and receives maintenance updates over two releases. This is approximatelly 12 months. As an example Leap Micro 5.2 was marked EOL with the Leap Micro 5.4 release. More details in the roadmap.

openSUSE Leap Micro is rebrand of SLE Micro, we're typically tailing SLE Micro by being one milestone late. Each SLE Micro release receives support for 4 years.

Discontinued distributions

Users running a (soon-to-be) discontinued version of openSUSE should upgrade their systems to a supported release to receive security updates and community support. Since eventually package repositories for discontinued releases are removed from download servers as well as the build target list of the Build Service, it will be increasingly difficult to install new software on such distributions.

The following distributions have reached their end of life and should not be used:

openSUSE versions up to and including 11.1 had a lifetime of two years, and versions up to and including 13.2 had a lifetime of two releases plus an extra two month overlap.

Discontinuation announcements will be sent to these mailing lists:

Images of discontinued images can still be downloaded from this list of mirrors.

Evergreen (long-term maintenance; discontinued)

The Evergreen project was a community effort for continued maintenance of selected openSUSE releases prior to openSUSE Leap.

All previous Evergreen versions of openSUSE are now out of support.

SUSE Linux Enterprise products

The lifetime of SUSE Enterprise products is listed on the SUSE website. Customers are able to receive support, security and maintenance updates for these products.

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