After 8 months of continues development. The openSUSE team has just announced openSUSE 42.3. Which is considered to be the latest release of the stable openSUSE branch (called Leap).

openSUSE continues to be an enterprise-ready distribution. Since it started to be built again on SUSE Linux base (since 42.1). The new version is based on SLE 12 SP3.

openSUSE 42.3 comes with a lot of new features and updates, here’s the new stuff:

New YasT2 Features & Updates

AutoYast which is the automatic configuration & installation solution provided by SUSE/openSUSE gained a lot of updates and features. It’s now faster in installation process in a lot of possible scenarios and gives more detailed information about changes performed using the automatic disk partition sizes.

However, the major update was introducing the yast2-configuration-manager package which enables YaST & AutoYast to be integrated with SaltStack and Puppet automation systems. Meaning that you can now simply create the configuration file you want and export it to one of those services for more rapid automation process.

Additionally, services management has been moved to the first stage of the installation process in AutoYast. Which enables performing a lot of different installation & configuration scenarios.

Snapper, which is the YaST2 module responsible for Btrfs snapshots was updated to version 0.5.0. Improving its support to work with Btrfs read-only root partitions.

Finally, YaST2, which is the spirit of openSUSE and SUSE distributions, gained tremendous updates. The YaST team has been running “development sprints” for months. Adding a lot of new updates and features. We recommend checking those posts separately as the number of newly added features is huge.

Probably the most noticeable changes are adding Trusted Boot support to EFI systems, improvements to the expert partitioner, better software selection during the installation, MD RAID partitions support, a special server installation profile, bug fixes and a lot lot more:

The installer now became more user friendly, asking what to do with Windows & Linux partitions:

A lot more is added.

openSUSE Health

openSUSE community has been maintaining a set of medical packages for years. This makes it very easy to turn openSUSE into a medical Linux distribution in few clicks. Such distribution would suite hospitals and health care institutions without any extra effort.

GNU Health is on the top of these packages. It’s a complete free and open source solution for electronic medical record (EMR), hospitals and health information systems (HIS) management.

In openSUSE 42.3, it was upgraded to version 3.2, which is a major release. The most noticeable change is that its code was ported completely into Python 3. It also offers enhanced support for WebDAV systems. A set of new modules were introduced such as health_ems and health_insurance, which enable you to manage emergency and heal insurance systems.

Updated Software

Linux kernel 4.4 is the default kernel in openSUSE 42.3. The default compiler is GCC 4.8.5. GCC 5, 6 and 7 are available from the official repositories. AppArmor 2.10.2 is shipped by default (which is SUSE’s alternative to SELinux).

The distribution also comes with Docker 1.12, systemd 228, PHP 7 (with PHP 5 packages available too), Mesa 17, Firefox 52 ESR, GNOME 3.20, KDE Plasma 5.8, LXQt 0.11 and around other 10000 updated packages coming from SUSE Linux and the openSUSE community.

All of those packages do have the same updates coming from the upstream.

openSUSE also provides a set of scientific software in its official repositories. For example you have Octave (alternative for Matlab), KStars (monitring the sky), Avogadro (for bioinformatics and molecular modeling), Open Babel (chemical data manipulation), Scilab (powerful numerical computations program) and a lot more.

Raspberry Pi & Cloud Images

openSUSE 42.3 Leap is considered to be one of the first Linux distributions to provide an official image for Raspberry Pi and other ARM devices. If you have one of those devices (ARM8 64-bit), you can easily download a special system image which is completely compatible with your hardware.

Additionally, openSUSE provides cloud images which can be easily installed on EC2, OpenStack, Microsoft Azure or other cloud vendors. You can grab those images from the download page.

Download openSUSE 42.3

For a complete list of new updates and features, check the openSUSE 42.3 features page. You may also check the official release notes of the new release.

You can download the latest version from the official openSUSE website:

Download openSUSE 42.3

Download openSUSE 42.3 Cloud