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openSUSE Leap 42.3 Gives Smooth Desktop and Server Upgrade

The openSUSE Project released openSUSE Leap 42.3 today bringing the community version more closely aligned with its shared core of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack 3.

The mutual packages of both Leap and SLE distributions give seasoned Linux users, systems administrators, and developers even more reason to use the newest chameleon distribution.

Users are advised to take advantage of the seamless upgrade to Leap 42.3. Leap 42.2 reaches its end of maintenance in six months.

“By avoiding major version updates in the base system as well as the desktops, the upgrade to Leap 42.3 is a rather unadventurous matter,” said Ludwig Nussel, openSUSE Leap release manager.

The release of Leap 42.3 provides adopters a reliable server operating system for deploying IT services in physical, virtual or cloud environments.

Leap’s third edition of the 42 series has more than 10,000 packages and offers stability-minded users a refresh and hardware enablement release. The release is powered by the same Linux 4.4 Long-Term-Support (LTS) kernel found in the previous Leap edition.

Leap 42.3 continues to use KDE’s Long-Term-Support release 5.8 as the default desktop selection while also offering GNOME 3.20, the same as used by SUSE Linux Enterprise. A variety of additional desktops is available in the installer through the newly designed desktop selection.

“Leap 42.3 is the culmination of several years of effort integrating SUSE’s Enterprise codebase with the exceptional high-quality work of the openSUSE community,” said Richard Brown, Chairman of the openSUSE Project. “I’m exceptionally proud of what the openSUSE Project has achieved with Leap 42.3 and hope our users appreciate this stable, yet innovative, approach to community Linux, which can really be relied upon to work.”

This release of openSUSE Leap is well suited for servers thanks to its server installation profile and its fully-featured text mode installer, including all the options of YaST without a graphical environment.

System administrators are going to love the backup solution Borg, which now can be used easier than ever thanks to Borgmatic’s wrapper to automatically backup your data daily with a systemd service. Sysadmins will also like Samba’s System Security Services Daemon integration with an Active Directory.

Leap, and the openSUSE project, provides the DevOps tool chain developers need to be successful. Microservices with Leap offer scalability and continuous delivery through the availability of Docker and Kubernetes as well as easy configuration with Salt, Ansible, and other openSUSE technologies. AutoYaST’s new integration with SaltStack and other configuration management systems can take care of the system installation (partitioning, network setup, etc.) and then delegate the system configuration to one of those widely used external tools.

Developers, and businesses can take advantage of extensive core libraries found in Leap 42.3 to build or enhance software for enterprise use. Since Leap and SLE share a common core, development with packages on Leap for use in production on SLE has never been easier. Furthermore, system integrators can develop on Leap with the possibility of getting their work into future SLE releases.

Leap provides the tools, languages and libraries for sustainable software development and engineering. Enterprise ready versions of Python, Ruby, Perl, Go, Rust, Haskell and PHP are all available in Leap.

Updates to the kernel and graphics stack enable more hardware and provide stability and performance improvements. openSUSE Leap 42.3 is…

Even More Enterprise

After basing openSUSE Leap on SLE (SUSE Linux Enterprise) and adding more source code to Leap 42.2 from SLE 12, Leap 42.3 adds even more packages from SLE 12 SP 3 and synchronizes several common packages. The shared codebase allows for openSUSE Leap 42.3 to receive enhanced maintenance and bug fixes from both the openSUSE community and SUSE engineers.

Server Ready

openSUSE Leap 42.3 offers a server installation option during the installation. With no graphical environment, a server install of Leap stands ready to do whatever you need from it. Something as simple as running a Web or Mail platform is easier than ever, as are complex projects using virtualization or container technologies. For example, users seeking an “Exchange-like” service can benefit from the latest version of the Kopano collaboration platform, including support for Thunderbird, Outlook and mobile mail clients. It’s also good to remember that Leap and all other openSUSE and SLE distributions have support for a full-featured text mode installer, giving all the same functionality as the graphical installer. The installer is fully capable of doing installations remotely using VNC or SSH, letting you set up your openSUSE Leap server without needing to be anywhere near it at all.

For Gaming

Gaming on Linux becomes more and more popular. openSUSE Leap 42.3 provides a stable system to run the popular Steam platform. To run games not yet available on Linux, Wine and PlayOnLinux are also included in this release.

For Creative Minds and Professionals

Unleash your creativity with design applications like FreeCAD for 3D printing or Gphoto for imagery editing. Scientists can use Avogadro for computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics and more. Health professionals also can choose GNU Health for patient care while being confident in the security and maintenance provided with Leap 42.3.

Get Leap!

See for yourself why openSUSE Leap is a community-enterprise distribution worth adopting. Downloads of openSUSE Leap 42.3 can be found at software.opensuse.org. We recommend checking out the Release Notes before upgrade or installation. Users currently running openSUSE Leap 42.2 can upgrade to openSUSE Leap 42.3 via the instructions at this link.

Thanks!

openSUSE Leap 42.3 represents the combined effort of thousands of developers who participate in our distributions and open-source projects. “Thank you” to all the contributors, inside and outside the openSUSE Project. All your hard work and contributions are appreciated by the open-source community and users worldwide. We believe Leap is the ideal Linux distribution for developers, sysadmins and users. We hope you have a lot of fun using it, and we look forward to working with you on the next release or in Tumbleweed.

About the openSUSE Project

The openSUSE Project is a worldwide community that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. It creates two of the world’s best Linux distributions, the Tumbleweed rolling-release, and Leap, the hybrid enterprise-community distribution. openSUSE is continuously working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source Software community. The project is controlled by its community and relies on the contributions of individuals, working as testers, writers, translators, usability experts, artists and ambassadors or developers. The project embraces a wide variety of technology, people with different levels of expertise, speaking different languages and having different cultural backgrounds. Learn more about it on opensuse.org