Portal:15.4

openSUSE 15.4 Release information

Leap 15.4 was succeeded by Leap 15.5 on June 7, 2023. openSUSE Leap 15.4 offers professional users, entrepreneurs and ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) updated support for modern hardware with improved YaST functionality and an improved installer. Leap 15.4 was released to the general public on June 09th, 2022.

Leap 15.4 is based on the Portal:Jump concept, where we combine openSUSE Backports with binaries from SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Feature highlights

openSUSE Leap 15.4 is...

Is this highlight too short? See Features_15.4 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 configuration 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 openSUSE Leap on top of binary packages from SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4. The release becomes fully binary identical with openSUSE Leap 15.4 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4.

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 migration to enterprise support. More information about how the distributions are built the can be found here.

Artificial Intelligence

Many Artificial Intelligence packages are available in Leap 15.4.

Tensorflow: A framework for deep learning that can be used by data scientists, provide numerical computations and data-flow graphs. Its flexible architecture enables users to deploy computations to one or more CPUs in a desktop, server, or mobile device without rewriting code.

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.

For Users

KDE

Plasma 5.24 LTS is a long-term support release from the KDE Plasma team. Leap 15.4 includes this new LTS version. In Plasma 5.24 you will find several improvements in the looks, ease of use and consistency. The next thing users will notice is the changes to Breeze, Plasma’s default theme. It has received a visual refresh to make it more closely match the Breeze style for apps, improving the visual consistency between them. The changing color scheme now toggles the standardized FreeDesktop light/dark color scheme preference. This means that non-KDE apps that respect this preference will automatically switch to light or dark mode based on the chosen color scheme. Global Themes can also specify and change the layouts of KDE’s Latte Dock.

GNOME

Leap 15.4 offers GNOME 41. GNOME 41 is the product of 6 months work by the GNOME project. It includes a number of significant improvements and new features, as well as a large collection of smaller enhancements. The most notable changes 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 15.4 is 4.16. This has improvements and visual enhancements that were available in Leap 15.3. A lot of effort was put in Xfce visual identity which resulted in a new set of application icons and color palette. Xfce 4.16 introduced new major features. There is a new visual identity in this release of Xfce. With new icons and palette, Xfce shines a little more out of the box. The Settings Manager received a visual refresh of its filter box, which can now be hidden permanently. The search capabilities of the filter box were improved by searching the descriptive 'Comments' part of each dialog's launcher (aka .desktop) file. The settings dialog of the power manager was cleaned up and shows either 'on battery' or 'plugged in' settings as opposed to both in a huge table.

Sway

openSUSE Leap 15.4 contains a tiling Wayland compositor Sway, that 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 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. Grafana and Prometheus are two new maintained packages that open up new possibilities for analytical experts. Grafana provides end users the ability to create interactive visual analytics. Feature-rich data-modeling packages: Graphite, Elastic and Prometheus give openSUSE users greater latitude to construct, compute and decipher data more intelligibly.

Internationalization

This openSUSE release 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 Linux Enterprise, boosting collaboration between community and enterprise.