After a year of development, the release of the openSUSE Leap 16.1 distribution has been published, built on the technologies of the commercial distribution SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16.1, the release of which is expected later this month. A universal DVD image is available for download, sized at 4.3 GB (x86-64-v2, aarch64, ppc64le, 390x) along with a minimal image for installation with network package loading (700 MB). Updates for openSUSE Leap 16.x releases will be provided for two years (two full release preparation cycles). Intermediate releases in the openSUSE Leap 16 branch, developed in parallel with the commercial distribution SUSE Linux Enterprise 16, will continue until autumn 2031 — the final release will be openSUSE Leap 16.6, with updates available until autumn 2033.
Key features of openSUSE Leap 16.1:
- The installer has added a setup mode for an atomically updatable system with base components mounted in read-only mode. Previously, this capability was offered in the form of a separate distribution
openSUSE Leap Micro, and is now integrated into openSUSE Leap as a special mode, supported alongside the option to build a system environment using traditional packages. Users of openSUSE Leap Micro are provided with tools for migrating to openSUSE Leap 16.1. - User environments KDE Plasma 6.6 (up from 6.4) and LXQt 2.4 (up from 2.2) have been updated. As in the previous release, GNOME 48, Cinnamon 6.4, MATE 1.28, Sway 1.10, and Xfce 4.20 (utilizing Wayland) are included.
- The components of the graphical stack have been updated to Mesa 26.0.7 and Qt 6.1.
- Package versions have been updated, including wine 11, QEMU 11.0.4, MariaDB 12.3.2, PostgreSQL 18, PHP 8.5.12, Node.js 24.11.3, Python 3.14, Rust 1.98, Ruby 3.4.10, LLVM/Clang 21, libvirt 12.4, Podman 5.8, LibreOffice 26.2, and GIMP 3.2. As in the previous release, Linux kernel 6.12, systemd 257, gcc 15, and glibc 2.40 are included.
- The Agama installer has been updated to version 24.
- A utility osdiff and a web service for comparing package versions in openSUSE Leap 16.0, openSUSE Leap 16.1, Tumbleweed, and upstream projects have been added. Filtering output and exporting data in JSON or CSV format is now possible.
- As in the previous release, the SELinux mandatory access control system is enabled by default, while the kernel has disabled support for 32-bit x86 systems and the execution of 32-bit binaries (which can be re-enabled via the parameter 'ia32_emulation=1' and the grub2-compat-ia32 package).
Source: opennet.ru
