The usual lifetime of openSUSE Leap minor versions have traditionally received updates for about 18 months, but the minor version of Leap 42.3 is being extended.

The last minor version of the Leap 42 series was scheduled to be maintained until January 2019, but that has changed thanks to SUSE committing to additional months of maintenance and security updates. Leap 42.3 is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack (SP) 3 and SUSE has agreed to keep publishing updates for Leap 42.3 until June 2019.

This means the extended End of Life for Leap 42.3 will increase the total lifetime of the Leap 42 series to 44 months.

Users of the openSUSE Leap 42 series are encouraged to use the additional months to prepare the upgrade to Leap 15, which was released in May.

Those who can’t migrate production servers to the new major version in time may want to take a (commercial) SLE subscription into consideration, which provides even a longer lifecycle. The proximity of Leap 42’s base system to SLE 12 keeps the technical effort to migrate workflows from Leap to SLE low.