The candidate for the openSUSE Leap 16 distribution release has been presented, built on the technologies of the next significant branch of the commercial distribution SLES 16, transitioning to the new SLFO (SUSE Linux Framework One) platform, previously known as ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform). openSUSE Leap 16 will retain the features of a classic distribution using traditional packages, while those who need an atomically updated system with a read-only base should use the openSUSE Leap Micro edition. Builds are available for x86_64, ARM64, s390x, and PowerPC architectures. The release is scheduled for October 1, 2025.
Key features of openSUSE Leap 16:
- A new installer Agama is implemented, notable for separating the user interface from the internal components of YaST and providing a frontend for installation management via a web interface.
- The installer for the installation offers only desktop environments that use Wayland. The option to use Xfce 4.20 on top of the labwc compositing manager, which uses Wayland, has been provided. For the organization of the login screen, instead of LightDM, the option to use greetd and gtkgreet has been implemented.
- Instead of the traditional YaST stack for system management, the Cockpit package is used, and a new package, Myrlyn, replaces the YaST Software GUI.
- By default, the SELinux mandatory access control system is enabled. AppArmor support is retained as an option.
- Support for the SysV initialization system has been discontinued. Only systemd can be used.
- Support for the x86-64-v1 architecture has been discontinued. Operation is only possible on x86 systems with x86_64-v2 architecture, which has been supported by processors since around 2009 (starting with Intel Nehalem) and is characterized by the presence of extensions such as SSE3, SSE4_2, SSSE3, POPCNT, LAHF-SAHF, and CMPXCHG16B.
- Package versions have been updated.
- Repository management utilizes a service based on the RIS (Repository Index Service) protocol. To reduce the size of metadata, repositories are divided for each supported architecture. Instead of multiple repositories, a single shared repository, repo-oss, is used, which includes packages from SUSE Linux Enterprise as well as community-supported packages.
- The Zypper package manager features parallel downloading of packages and metadata, along with a new backend that optimally reuses already established connections, enhancing metadata processing efficiency. During the update of 250 packages with a total size of 100 MB, the download time decreased from 68.7 seconds to 13.1 seconds after enabling the new backend and parallel mode, while updating 407 packages with a size of 1 GB dropped from 281.1 seconds to 119.6 seconds.
- Support for running 32-bit executable files will be discontinued in SUSE Linux Enterprise. To continue using the Steam application, which only exists in a 32-bit version and requires the presence of installed 32-bit dependencies in the system, a grub2-compat-ia32 package has been implemented in openSUSE, which sets the 'ia32_emulation=1' parameter when loading the Linux kernel. The installation of the selinux-policy-targeted-gaming package, which is not included in the base distribution, will also be required for Steam to function.
Source: opennet.ru
