After a year of development published release of the distribution kit openSUSE Leap 16.1, built on the technologies of the commercial distribution kit SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16.1, expected to be released later this month. For download available a universal DVD assembly, size 4.3 GB (x86-64-v2, aarch64, ppc64le, 390x) and a stripped-down image for installation with downloading packages over the network (700 MB). Updates for openSUSE Leap 16.x releases are completed over a period of two years (two full release cycles). Interim releases in the openSUSE Leap 16 branch, accompanied in parallel with the commercial distribution SUSE Linux Enterprise 16, will be formed until the fall of 2031 – the final release will be openSUSE Leap 16.6, updates for which will be released until the fall of 2033.
Main features openSUSE Leap 16.1:
- An installation mode has been added to the installer in the form of an atomically updated system with basic hardware mounted in read-only mode. Previously, such a feature was distributed in the form of a separate openSUSE Leap Micro distribution, and is now integrated into openSUSE Leap in the form of a special mode, supported along with the ability to build a system environment using traditional packages. OpenSUSE Leap Micro users are provided with tools for migration to openSUSE Leap 16.1.
- KDE Plasma 6.6 (was 6.4) and LXQt 2.4 (was 2.2) user environments have been updated. As in the previous release, GNOME 48, Cinnamon 6.4, MATE 1.28, Sway 1.10 and Xfce 4.20 (Wayland enabled) are supplied.
- Graphics stack components have been updated to Mesa 26.0.7 and Qt 6.1.
- Updated package versions, including wine 11, QEMU 11.0.4, MariaDB 12.3.2, PostgreSQL 18, PHP 8.5.12, Node.js 24.11.3, Python 3.14, Rust 1.98, Ruby 3.4.10, LLVM/Clang 21, libvirt 12.4, Podman 5.8, LibreOffice 26.2 and GIMP 3.2. As in the previous release, the Linux kernel 6.12, systemd 257, gcc 15 and glibc 2.40 are supplied.
- The Agama installer has been updated to version 24.
- Added utility osdiff and web service for comparing package versions in 16.0 openSUSE Leap 16.0, openSUSE Leap 16.1, Tumbleweed and upstream projects. Options are provided to filter output and export data to JSON or CSV.
- As in the previous release, SELinux mandatory access control is enabled by default, support for 32-bit x86 systems and running 32-bit executables is disabled in the kernel (returned through the “ia32_emulation=1” parameter and the grub2-compat-ia32 package).