openSUSE Leap uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), which gives Leap a level of stability unmatched by other Linux distributions, and combines that with community developments to give users, developers and sysadmins the best stable Linux experience available.
Leap 15.2 is filled with several containerization technologies like Singularity, which bring containers and reproducibility to scientific computing and the high-performance computing (HPC) world. Singularity first appeared in the Leap distribution in Leap 42.3 and provides functionality to build smallest minimal containers and runs the containers as single application environments.
Another official package in Leap 15.2 is libcontainers-common, which allows the configuration of files and manpages shared by tools that are based on the github.com/containers libraries, such as Buildah, CRI-O, Podman and Skopeo.
Docker containers and tooling make building and shipping applications easy and fast. Use the package containerd to run containers according to Open Container Initiative Specifications.
Flatpak and AppImage, which is software utility for software deployment, package management, and application virtualization, allow developers to provide users with Linux application that run in isolation from the rest of the system.
This release uses KDE’s Plasma 5.18 Long-Term-Support version and all its community supported tools and applications. Leap offers Live Images for the Plasma desktop, and through PackageHub, users of SLE 15 SP2, can also use Plasma 5.18 LTS.
Users of openSUSE Leap can choose their favorite desktop environment, configuration and setup. The GNOME 3.34 version in Leap 15.2 is the same as the version used in SLE 15 SP2, which uses Wayland by default. Leap offers Live Images for the GNOME desktop.
openSUSE Leap 15.2 contains the the long awaited Xfce 4.14. After a long development cycle (4 years!), all of the core components and applications have been ported to GTK 3. The desktop now comes with a new openSUSE branded GTK theme by default and we continued to polish the default experience by adding new packages that complete the desktop and make it more approachable to new users.
openSUSE Leap 15.2 contains a tiling Wayland compositor Sway, that is a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11.
