In an interview, Richard Brown, the openSUSE Chairman, said that the focus of openSUSE Leap is a super-stable release of openSUSE targeted for server workloads and professionals who use desktop Linux as a development platform. Leap is based on the latest release of SUSE Linux Enterprise. According to Brown, openSUSE Leap is an enterprise-grade distribution that offers a mix of packages from openSUSE's rolling-release Tumbleweed project and SUSE Linux Enterprise.

“Having a community distribution that shares a common DNA with enterprise is the smart way to interact with the open-source ecosystem,” said Kai Dupke, long-time openSUSE user and senior product manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15.

openSUSE Leap 15 makes it easy for users to migrate to SLE, allowing users to gain access to SUSE’s commercial support offerings. The latest Leap introduces a new partitioner, integrates the Groupware Kopano, and moves to Firewalld. In addition, Leap 15 also introduces a system role selection with a classic “server” or “transactional server” role with transactional updates and a read-only root file system. This configuration brings the benefits of atomic updates to the full scope of deployments, from the Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded devices to classical server and desktop roles.

Leap 15 is optimized for cloud usage scenarios as a virtualization guest and offers a great variety of desktops, including KDE and GNOME. Leap also features the return of Live images for simple test-driving.

openSUSE Leap comes with KDE’s Plasma Desktop as the default desktop environment with Gnome as an option during installation.

Download openSUSE Leap 15 for free from the openSUSE website.