Jumping into openSUSE Leap 16

The openSUSE project is nearing the release of Leap 16, its first major release since openSUSE Leap 15 in May 2018. This release brings some changes to the core of the distribution aside from the usual software upgrades; YaST has been retired, SELinux has replaced AppArmor as the default mandatory access control (MAC) system, and more. If all goes according to plan, Leap 16 final should be released in early October, with planned support through 2031.

A lot has happened behind the scenes at SUSE since the last major Leap release: the company was sold by Micro Focus to EQT Partners in 2018, acquired Kubernetes management company Rancher Labs in 2020, went public in 2021, and then was taken private again in 2023. Through all that, the folks making SUSE have tried to continue business as usual to keep developing all of the offerings from SUSE and openSUSE.

Leap, tumble, or roll slowly

The openSUSE project offers various editions that have different update cycles, which may be confusing to folks who are thinking of trying the distribution for the first time. OpenSUSE Leap is a traditional Linux distribution based on the source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), so it conveys most of the stability and predictability that users might want from an "enterprise" version without the costs—or support. It also has had the pace of an enterprise version; major releases generally come every three to four years, and Leap has once-yearly minor releases.

The release cycle for Leap may also be a bit confusing; a minor release may contain breaking changes and major upgrades that one might not expect in a long-term-support release. For example, there may be major updates to desktop environments between minor releases; 15.4 and 15.5 included GNOME 41, while 15.6 jumped ahead to GNOME 45. Leap 15.5 dropped Python 2 support entirely, whereas other long-term-support distributions have continued to keep up Python 2 for the lifetime of the release. However, the project has avoided doing other major breaking changes, such as dropping YaST, as part of minor releases. If there's a document that spells out the expected lifecycle of various components, I haven't located it.

The project recommends Leap for conservative users who prioritize a working system over having the latest software. More adventurous, or impatient, users may want to opt for one of the openSUSE rolling releases such as Tumbleweed; it pushes out updates continuously from the rolling development repository Factory after the packages have passed automated testing. Slowroll is also a rolling-release distribution that aims to provide more stability than Tumbleweed by sending out monthly updates without the longer update cycle of Leap. The project also has image-based releases for the desktop; Aeon features the GNOME desktop, and Kalpa offers KDE. LWN covered Aeon in June 2024.

Installing Leap

Leap is available for x86_64, Arm 64-bit (aarch64), PowerPC (ppc64le), and s390x systems. The project offers two image types: an offline installer image with a large package set and a network installer image that requires a network connection to fetch software outside of the base set of packages.

The new Agama installer is easy to use and should be approachable enough for both new and experienced users. The installer allows users to move back and forth between steps easily; one can, for example, move from the software selection step back to choosing a hostname, or configuring networking. It is even possible to start over and select a different version of openSUSE entirely. The Agama installer images for openSUSE Leap 16 also give users the option of Leap Micro 6.2, a version of Leap designed to run workloads in containers or virtual machines.

Agama has reasonable defaults for automatic disk partitioning, but custom partitioning is harder than it should be. For example, it is not immediately obvious how to resize partitions, or switch from Btrfs to another type of filesystem, such as XFS. Those options are present, but difficult to find; they are located in the drop-down "Details" menu, instead of being available through the "Change" menu where one would expect to find them.

During installation, users can pick from a subset of available software, such as the preferred desktop environment or software to set up a KVM virtualization host, mail server, and so forth. The desktop options are GNOME 48, KDE Plasma 6.4.2, and Xfce 4.20; the installer offers to set up Xfce with a still-experimental Wayland session rather than an X11 session. The packages for an X11 Xfce session can be added after installation, but not before. That seems like an odd choice since the Wayland session support for Xfce is known to be buggy and incomplete. Indeed, it was a bit of a hassle to install the X11 support in a virtual machine while using Xfce's Wayland session; there were quite a few glitches in drawing the windows, and input was so laggy as to be almost unusable. The Xfce X11 session was fine.

The big three desktops are not the only desktop environments, window managers, or Wayland compositors for Leap 16; Cinnamon, LXQt, MATE, Sway, and others are available too. But it is not possible to select any of those options until after installation. I was pleased to see that Leap 16 had the niri Wayland compositor packaged, but less so after I noticed it was a relatively old version from September 2024.

AppArmor has been the default security module for openSUSE for many years, but SUSE's Cathy Hu opened a discussion about switching to SELinux last year. The response was generally positive, though a few people expressed the hope that the project would continue to offer AppArmor as an option. The good news is that AppArmor is still available, but the bad news is that it is not present as an option in the installer. Users can choose not to install SELinux, but AppArmor has to be set up after the install.

Overall, the switch to Agama seems to be a success, though there are areas (such as partitioning) that need a bit more work if they are to accommodate users who need more complex setups.

Leap 16, at least as of this writing, includes a mostly up-to-date selection of software. For example, it offers GNU Emacs 30.1, GCC 15.1.1, the GNU C Library (glibc) 2.40, Perl 5.42.0, Python 3.13.5, RPM 4.20.1, Ruby 3.4.3, and Vim 9.1, which are all relatively recent releases if not the latest from upstream. The kernel is reported as 6.12.0, but it includes quite a few backports from later kernels and assorted patches from SUSE as well. The source, including patches, is available on GitHub.

Software management

The first order of business after installing a new distribution is to run updates and install the software I use day to day. With YaST gone, SUSE now offers Myrlyn as its graphical software package and repository manager. It started as a SUSE Hack Week project named YQPkg in November 2024; it is built with Qt6 and uses libzypp as its backend. While the GNOME Software and KDE Discover graphical-software-management utilities are slick and user-friendly, they fall down when it comes to installing software outside of the desktop applications, such as development tools or system applications.

Myrlyn provides a lot of the functionality users can get from managing software directly with zypper or rpm, without requiring them to learn the command-line incantations for doing so. For example, viewing a package's dependencies or the files it contains is just a matter of point-and-click in Myrlyn. Many folks will no doubt find it more convenient to use a GUI tool to search available packages and skim the list for desired software than needing to use "zypper search" in the terminal.

I found myself wishing that Fedora had a similar tool. It's not overly difficult, for example, to work with Fedora's package groups using "dnf group" commands, but Myrlyn provides a much better interface for doing the same thing (though openSUSE uses the term "patterns" rather than "groups").

Myrlyn has made quite a bit of progress in the short time since its creation; I've found it to be stable and quite usable. It does not offer the same "app store" experience as Discover or Software, but it is a much better tool for managing all of the software available for Leap—with the exception of Flatpaks.

In early discussions around the development of Leap 16, there were concerns that important software like Firefox and Thunderbird would only be available as Flatpaks. That has proven not to be the case; Firefox is installed as a regular package from the openSUSE repositories. Thunderbird is not installed by default, but it is available as a regular package; it can be installed from Flathub for those who wish, if they take the extra steps to install Flatpak support and enable the Flathub repository. Users can manage Flatpaks using the flatpak command-line utility or through the desktop software-management applications.

Much of YaST has been removed for Leap 16. It is still possible to install YaST and use its terminal user interface, but the graphical support for it is gone. The Cockpit web-based-administration tool is the heir apparent for YaST. It may not be a one-to-one replacement for YaST, but it should help to fill the gap. Like YaST, Cockpit is modular; it has core functionality like user management, a web console for command-line access, and so forth, plus add-on applications for using NetworkManager, managing storage, working with virtual machines, and more.

Leap 16 has Cockpit version 340, which was released in June, but Cockpit development moves pretty quickly; the project just released version 347 on September 17. The openSUSE project has packaged the official and SUSE-developed applications for Cockpit, except for cockpit-ostree and Cockpit Files. Since Leap does not use OSTree, it is not a problem that openSUSE hasn't packaged that application, but not including the Files application for managing files on a remote host is a bit of a miss. It was first released about a week after Cockpit 340, so it's a little surprising that it's missing.

I spent a roughly equal amount of time using openSUSE's GNOME and KDE desktops; both desktops seem to hew pretty closely to the project defaults, and there are no big surprises for GNOME or KDE fans coming to openSUSE from another Linux distribution. Without the openSUSE colors and branding, which I found pleasant, it would be difficult to tell at first glance if one were using Debian, Fedora, or openSUSE.

Leap 16 sets up Snapper to manage snapshots of the root (/) filesystem. Snapshots of the root filesystem are taken automatically when using Zypper (or Myrlyn) to install, upgrade, or remove software. This can be handy if one needs to revert a package upgrade or removal that has broken networking or another crucial component. What Leap does not have, with the removal of YaST, is a GUI for managing snapshots or rolling back to previous snapshots.

Out of the box, Snapper is not set up to take snapshots of Btrfs subvolumes like /home, /opt, or /srv. Users can add add /home or other subvolumes manually, however. There is a good tutorial for working with Snapper, but I wonder how many users might not even know that Leap has the capability under the hood since it's not particularly discoverable.

Support

Traditionally, the cadence for openSUSE Leap was to release a minor release every year with 18 months of support thereafter; this was to give users a short overlap between the last version and the new version. So, when 15.4 came out, users could expect 15.5 in a year, and had six months before they would need to upgrade from 15.3 to continue getting updates.

The plan for Leap 16 is to continue the annual cadence for minor releases but to give two years of support for each point release. Users who start with Leap 16.0 on day one will have two years before they need to upgrade—though they can, of course, move to the new release sooner. Given the way that some components, such as desktops, are upgraded it may be more accurate to think of each point release of Leap 16 as having its own two-year lifecycle, rather than thinking of Leap 16 as having a six-year lifecycle, even though the project says it is supported through 2031.

With the pending release of Leap 16, there are no more minor releases planned for the Leap 15 series. The end of life for 15.6 is scheduled for April 30, 2026. Assuming that the schedule on openSUSE's roadmap holds, that gives users on 15.6 about six months before updates end. The project has a system upgrade guide and migration tool to help people move from 15 to 16. Overall, if one is in the market for a general-purpose Linux distribution with long-term support, Leap 16 seems like a good option.