The Open Source world is excited as the highly anticipated release of openSUSE Leap 15.5 hits the scene.
With its latest iteration, the openSUSE project raises the bar once again, delivering a powerful and user-friendly operating system that caters to the needs of both individuals and businesses.
Exactly one year after the release of its predecessor, Leap 15.5 introduces a host of new features, improvements, and security enhancements, solidifying its position as a leading choice for Linux hobbyists, professionals, and developers worldwide. So let’s see what’s new.
openSUSE Leap 15.5 Highlights
Powered by Linux kernel 5.14.21, openSUSE Leap 15.5 comes based on SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 Service Pack 5. The release will receive updates within 18 months until December 2024.
Desktop Environments
We’ll start with the desktop environments, where we have updates to some of them so users can choose from them during the installation of Leap 15.5.
Of course, in keeping with tradition, the focus is mainly on the Plasma desktop, which is the preferred choice of openSUSE. In this light, users get (almost) the most up-to-date desktop version, Plasma 5.27.4.
It is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, and in Leap 15.5, it comes accompanied by the KDE Frameworks 5.103 and the KDE Gear 22.12.3 software collection maintained by the KDE community.
So, with it, users get some exciting new features such as window tiling capabilities, a host of GUI enhancements enhancing the user experience, and more control over their desktop environment.
GNOME desktop users may be slightly disappointed, as Leap 15.5 ships with GNOME 41, released in September 2021, and is a far cry from the current GNOME 44.
GNOME 41’s most noticeable changes include an updated Software app, additional multitasking settings, and improved power management capabilities.
Of course, Leap’s goal is not to provide the latest and greatest but a stable and reliable platform. Linux enthusiasts who prefer to be on the wave’s crest can take advantage of openSUSE Tumbleweed.
At the same time, Xfce users will be pleased to get their hands on the latest version of this excellent lightweight desktop environment, Xfce 4.18.
This means they get all of the benefits, such as the Thunar file manager can now display the count of containing files for directories in the “Size” column in the list view.
Furthermore, Xfce 4.18 can undo and redo basic file operations such as move, rename, trash, link, and create actions. And last but not least, this release brings to the scene a file highlighting, making the user experience more colorful in the literal sense.
Development Tools
With a strong focus on developers, openSUSE Leap 15.5 ships with many updated and newly introduced development tools.
DevOps engineers can now benefit from Podman 4.4, Docker’s quickly growing alternative. In addition, the Lightweight Container Runtimes for Kubernetes, CRI-O 1.22, is also presented here. To round up the list, Leap 15.5 includes containerd version 1.6.19.
AI and machine learning tools were also considered. As a result, you will find updated versions of several instruments, such as PyTorch 1.4, ONNX 1.6, Grafana 8.5.22, and Prometheus 2.2.3.
Finally, there is good news for Python developers. Leap 15.5 benefits from a fully usable Python 3.11 stack in parallel to the system Python (python36), this way providing a more up-to-date release.
Other Leap 15.5 Improvements
Under the hood, openSUSE Leap 15.5 relies on the systemd 249.10 init system, which includes backporting fixes and updates. Mesa, an open-source implementation of OpenGL, was updated from 21.2.4 to version 22.3.5.
The device firmware updater package fwupd was bumped to version 1.8.6, which fixes compiling errors when building for s390x and ppc64le architectures. Moreover, OpenSUSE Leap 15.5 can boot from NVMe-oF over TCP, allowing flexible creation and orchestration of diskless clients in SAN environments.
In addition, CUPS, the open-source printing system, received an update to v2.2.7-3.20.1, providing bug fixes that address issues in the scheduler, IPP Everywhere support, CUPS library, and USB printer support.
On the client apps side, Leap 15.5 offers LibreOffice 7.4.3, Firefox Web Browser 102.11.0esr, VLC Media Player 3.0.18, Thunderbird Mail Client 102.10.1, etc. We’ll add that the Vim text editor receives a major upgrade to the new Vim 9 version.
You can refer to the release announcement for detailed information about all changes in openSUSE Leap 15.5.
Download & Update
With the release of openSUSE Leap 15.5, current Leap 15.4 users should upgrade to it to receive security and maintenance updates within six months of June 7, 2023. Leap 15.4 will be out of support (EOL) in December 2023.
Leap 15.5 comes with separate installer images for offline (4.1 GB) and network (203 MB) installation for x86_64 (Intel or AMD), aarch64 (Arm), ppc64le (PowerPC), and s390x (IBM zSystems) architectures.
System requirements are:
- 2 GHz dual core-processor or better
- 2GB RAM + additional memory for your workload
- Over 40GB of free hard drive space
You can immediately get your copy of the installation ISO images of openSUSE Leap 15.5 from the download section of the openSUSE website.
So what are you waiting for? Grab your copy today and enjoy one of the best general-purpose Linux distributions.
Finally, if you are currently running openSUSE Leap 15.4, our step-by-step guide will walk you seamlessly through how to upgrade to openSUSE Leap 15.5.
