The SUSE company has published the release of the distribution kit SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16. The SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 fork comes 7 years after the release of SUSE 15. SUSE 16 packages are already used as the basis for the community-supported openSUSE Leap 16 distribution. The distribution is download and free to use, but access to updates and patches is limited to a 60-day trial period. The release is available in builds for the aarch64, ppc64le, s390x and x86_64 architectures.
For the SUSE Linux 16 branch, a more predictable and flexible release cycle will be provided. Instead of SP updates (Service Pack), a scheme with intermediate releases (16.1, 16.2, etc.) and long-term support (LTS – Long Term Support) will begin to be used.
The total maintenance time for the SUSE Linux 16 branch will be 16 years. In total, it is planned to create 7 intermediate releases – from 16.0 to 16.6, each of which will be published annually in November. Updates for each individual milestone release will be supported for 5 years – 2 years of general support and 3 years of extended support (LTS).
- A new Agama installer has been used, notable for separating the user interface from the internal components of YaST and providing a front-end for managing the installation through a web interface.
- The system management stack has been modernized. Instead of the traditional YaST stack, the Cockpit package is used for system management, and the new Myrlyn package is proposed instead of the YaST Software GUI. Support for SysV init scripts has been discontinued. Only systemd units can be used.
- By default, only desktop environments that use Wayland are offered. X.org Server has been removed from distribution. Support for running X11-based applications is retained using XWayland. The basic desktop environment is based on GNOME 48. The VNC server, GTK2, Qt5 and wxWidgets have been discontinued.
- The capabilities for automatically creating snapshots with slices of the file system state, based on Btrfs and the Snapper utility, have been expanded. Snapshots can now be used in system images for cloud platforms. By default, the ability to roll back changes is integrated into all components and the administrator can roll back almost any change – from system updates to the application of individual patches and configuration modifications.
- The main structure includes integrated support for Live patches, which allow you to fix vulnerabilities and critical errors in the kernel and the glibc and openssl libraries without the need to restart the system.