Replacing openSUSE Leap

ALP is, by design, an amorphous project; it is intended to facilitate the creation of focused distributions for a number of different use cases. The initial targets appear to be server workloads, with a focus on containers and confidential-computing uses. While it is somewhat hard to get a grasp on what future SUSE products will look like, the company does not appear to be heading toward the creation of another traditional enterprise distribution as part of the ALP transition.

Rolling slowly

This change poses both a challenge and an opportunity for the openSUSE project. The loss of the existing base means that it will not be possible to continue to create Leap in its current form, but the flexibility of ALP means that a number of options may open up in the future. Before pursuing one or more of those options, though, the community must decide what it wants to do — and what it has the resources to do. To that end, a survey of openSUSE users and contributors was recently run; the results have been posted, as has an analysis of those results by Richard Brown. The latter has sparked the beginning of what may be a long conversation in the openSUSE community.

The results are somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, there seems to be a significant portion of the community that would prefer to keep Leap going in something close to its current form. On the other, though, there is also a lot of interest in rolling distributions, which are almost the opposite of how the core of Leap is managed. Respondents were asked about two possible distributions that the community could create to take Leap's place:

• "Linarite" would be "a regular old fashioned release desktop distribution", though with a smaller package selection than is provided by Leap now. It would be based on a SUSE project known as "Granite"; there is little public information available regarding this project, but it seems to be the ALP-derived product that will be the closest to a traditional enterprise server distribution.
• "Slowroll", instead, is a rolling distribution based on the existing openSUSE Tumbleweed offering (which is not built on enterprise packages and can be expected to continue without big changes), but with a stronger focus on stability. Packages would move from Tumbleweed to Slowroll when they have shown, over a period of time, that they are unlikely to introduce new problems. Slowroll, Brown said, is "an attempt to provide something less scary than full speed Tumbleweed".

After looking at the survey responses, Brown came to a few conclusions regarding where, in his opinion, the openSUSE community should focus its efforts. By his reading, the respondents "overwhelmingly" support rolling releases; as a result, he said, any Leap replacement should look like Slowroll rather than Linarite. "It is the most popular with our users, and the option more closely aligned to what our contributors use themselves."

Beyond that, he said, openSUSE should focus firmly on desktop use cases rather than trying to build something that might be suitable for server deployments as well. Given that openSUSE will be able to package and ship its own copies of the SUSE products coming out of ALP, and those products will "be awesome for folk who want Enterprise-like server distros", Brown does not see much point in openSUSE expending its resources in that direction. Instead, since SUSE has little interest in the desktop area at this point, that is where openSUSE can make a real contribution.

An openSUSE Slowroll can only work, though, if the community can pull together the resources to build it, and Brown is "concerned that we do not have enough contributors to make any Leap replacement viable". Creating and maintaining Slowroll would require more resources than the current Leap effort, and he is not convinced that those resources will be available.

Michal Suchánek questioned the idea that building and maintaining Slowroll would require more work, given that it would mostly just pull packages from the existing Tumbleweed distribution. Brown answered that it would require a lot of work that is not being done (by the openSUSE community, at least) now:

Because, unlike Leap where maintenance for SLE packages is effectively 'automatic' (ie. taken care as part of the daily business of SLE), and unlike Tumbleweed where it's also effectively 'automatic' ('just throw a new version at it), Slowroll will likely require old-fashioned maintenance (CVE bumps, backports, narrow-fixes) for packages in Slowroll but not-yet-ready to be copied from Tumbleweed.

If the project is going to do Slowroll at all, he added, it needs to do the job properly so that it is truly a more secure and stable offering than Tumbleweed.

Matěj Cepl, instead, suggested that ALP might be Slowroll, and that openSUSE could have it for free. Brown's response was that, if ALP ends up producing a rolling release at all, it will advance at a rather slower rate than the community would like. Slowroll, he said, is an opportunity to create a rolling release that rolls at a speed chosen by the openSUSE community.

Taking Leap for Granite

Not everybody in the community has given up on continuing to produce a distribution that, even if it is not Leap, would have many of the same characteristics as Leap. Simon Lees expressed interest in building such a distribution on top of SUSE's Granite, whatever that turns out to be. Brown pointed out that Granite is not planned for release before 2025; given that there is currently no plan within openSUSE to create a Leap 15.7 release, basing a successor on Granite would likely leave Leap users without a supported alternative for at least a year. Lees, though, is convinced that a Granite-based Leap replacement is a viable option, and seems determined to prove it as Granite takes shape:

Well i'm the sort of person that will take the goal of having a distro based on Granite before the end of 15.6 and push my hardest to resolve the issues to get there and if come September / October 2025 that is looking unlikely i'd start to look at temporary workarounds to bridge the gap.

Suchánek asked why there was no Leap 15.7 release planned; Brown answered that creating that release would take resources — specifically the SUSE developers tasked to work on openSUSE — away from helping with a Leap replacement. He later added that: "if I were to persuade SUSE to sponsor the work for a 15.7, that 15.7 will not just be the last Leap release, but we'll almost certainly have no replacement going forward". That, he said, would be the end of a stable, desktop-oriented openSUSE release:

openSUSE Leap is a very Desktop-centric distribution.

None of SUSE's planned ALP products have any intention of being a Desktop-centric offering.

If openSUSE doesn't start the work now, then ALP will never be ready for the Desktop use cases we currently enjoy with Leap.

In April, Brown had looked at where ALP was headed and concluded that "if we the community want to build something like old Leap, that should be totally technically feasible". Now, though, he seems to be arguing that openSUSE only has one viable option, Slowroll, going forward. Lees, instead, appears to still be in favor of doing something more along the lines of an "old Leap" with an upcoming ALP product as the base. What the community as a whole feels is the best approach is yet to be determined.

It is clearly an important decision point for one of the oldest existing Linux distributions. Perhaps openSUSE's biggest problem, though, is one that only appeared at the edges of this conversation: how can the project attract more contributors so that its options might be less limited in the future? According to Brown's initial message, only 61 people contributed to the last Leap release. Without people to do the work, the direction that openSUSE would like to go will only be so relevant.