The openSUSE community has released the latest version of their desktop operating system, openSUSE 42.2 Leap. The latest release is a minor upgrade to the 42.x branch that comes with many new features.

Douglas DeMaio, of the openSUSE release team, wrote, “openSUSE Leap 42.2 is powered by the Linux 4.4 Long-Term-Support (LTS) kernel and is a secure, stable, and reliable server operating system for deploying IT services in physical, virtual, or cloud environments.’

openSUSE Leap 42.2 is based on SLE SP2, which was released a few weeks ago. According to DeMaio, Leap 42.2 gets some of its source code from SLE 12 Service Pack 2. “New technologies such as NVDIMM, OmniPATH, and the Data Plane Development Kit with Open vSwitch are backported for the release. XEN no longer requires its own kernel and is supported by the default kernel. Along with the shared SLE codebase, openSUSE Leap 42.2 gets packages, maintenance, and bug fixes from the openSUSE community and SUSE engineers. The 42 series of Leap achieves at a minimum 36 months of maintenance and security updates starting from 42.1.”

openSUSE 42.2 comes with KDE’s Plasma 5.8, the LTS version of Plasma that was created specifically for openSUSE. It also comes with Gnome 3.20.2, a bit older version of Gnome. OpenSUSE Leap is not positioned as a cutting edge distribution and is the most stable openSUSE experience, which means the developers are a bit conservative when it comes to packages. Packages go into Leap once they are fully tested. If you are looking for the latest packages, try the Tumbleweed rolling release edition.

In 2015, openSUSE moved the openSUSE base to SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) SP1, which brought the two distributions closer to each other. The openSUSE community also announced a rolling release distribution called Tumbleweed, in honor of Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman. Tumbleweed is now the upstream for openSUSE Leap and, in part, for SUSE Linux Enterprise. Every package that goes into openSUSE Leap or SUSE Linux Enterprise has to go through Tumbleweed, although enterprise customers can also work directly with SUSE Linux Enterprise teams to get those features in SLE directly.

openSUSE Leap 42.2 is available now for free download.