The release of openSUSE Leap 15 is scheduled to be release during the first day of this year’s openSUSE Conference in Prague, Czech Republic on May 25.

The package submission deadline for non-bug fix package updates is April 24 as Leap enters the release candidate phase. The scheduled release for Leap 15 is May 25 at 12:00 UTC.

Leap has been using a rolling development model for building Leap 15 beta versions. Bug fixes and new packages have been released via snapshots to users testing the beta versions. The snapshots for the test version will stop and maintenance and security updates for Leap 15’s release will begin next month. Linux professionals and anyone looking to use Leap 15 are encouraged to test the beta versions as there is still snapshots being released and announced on the openSUSE Factory Mailing List. A list of items to test is available here.

The openSUSE project is pleased to announce that with Leap 15 Live images will again be available. Both KDE and GNOME can be tested without having to change your current system.

openSUSE Leap 15 shares a common core with SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 sources and has thousands of community packages on top to meet the needs of professional and semi-professional users and their workloads.

The Kubic Project contributed a system role selection available with the release that offers two types of server roles; the classic server role and a Transactional Server role, which uses transactional updates and a Read-Only Root Filesystem. The release at the openSUSE Conference will give the openSUSE community and Free Open Source Software projects an opportunity to discuss plans for the openSUSE Leap 15 release, which will receive maintenance updates for at least three years.