The developers of the openSUSE project have announced the beginning of work on the next significant release of the openSUSE Leap 16 distribution, which will be based on the new technology platform ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform), which the commercial distribution SUSE is also transitioning to. The release of openSUSE Leap 16.0 is planned for 2025.
This year, on June 11, the release of openSUSE Leap 15.6 will be formed, which is likely to become the last classic release of the project. If, for any reason, the development of openSUSE Leap 16 is delayed, there is a possibility of extending the lifecycle of openSUSE Leap 15.6 or releasing an additional openSUSE Leap 15.7. The development of openSUSE Leap 16 plans to continue using the development model based on the openSUSE Factory repository and achieve an optimal balance between new technologies ALP, the traditional Linux operating system, and community-driven package integration initiatives.
The ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform) is positioned as a continuation of the development of the SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution and features a separation of the distribution's core into parts. The core of the distribution will become a slimmed-down 'host OS' environment that includes only the components minimally necessary to operate on top of the hardware and manage it. All applications and user-space components will run not in a mixed environment, but in separate containers or in virtual machines, executed over the 'host OS' and isolated from each other.
The SLE Micro product, based on the MicroOS project, serves as the foundation for the 'host OS'. For centralized management, configuration management systems Salt (pre-installed) and Ansible (optional) are offered. For launching isolated containers, tools such as Podman and K3s (Kubernetes) are available. Among the system components moved into containers are yast2, podman, k3s, cockpit, GDM (GNOME Display Manager), and KVM.
Notable features of the system environment include the use of full disk encryption (FDE, Full Disk Encryption) by default with the option to store keys in TPM. The root partition is mounted in read-only mode and remains unchanged during operation. The environment employs an atomic update installation mechanism, based on the use of the default package manager and snapshot mechanism in the Btrfs file system. A customizable mode for automatic update installation is provided. To maintain system resilience (self-healing), the last stable state is captured using Btrfs snapshots (in case of anomalies detected after applying updates or changing settings, the system automatically reverts to the previous state).
The platform uses a multi-version software stack — thanks to the use of containers, different versions of tools and applications can be utilized simultaneously. For example, applications that depend on different versions of Python, Java, and Node.js can run concurrently, isolating incompatible dependencies. Base dependencies are provided in the form of BCI (Base Container Images) sets. Users can create, update, and delete software stacks without affecting other environments.
Source: opennet.ru
