openSUSE Leap 15.5 has been officially released, offering many updates to the mature Linux distribution. This release includes updated components in all areas of application, benefiting both desktop users and server administrators. SUSE has made many substructure improvements, and Leap 15.5 is binary compatible with SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5 (SLE).
The release comes with a 5.14.21 kernel, which is 18 months old, and has several backported patches from later versions. This means it may not be possible to make reliable statements on whether certain hardware works well with the SLE core driver. However, Leap 15.5 should not pose major problems for newer hardware.
Desktop users benefit from the new versions of common desktop environments, including Gnome 41, Xfce 4.18, KDE Plasma 5.27 (LTS), and Sway as a tiling window compositor. end-user software and classic desktop software have also been updated, including VLC, Amarok, Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice 7.2.5.
Server and desktop systems benefit equally from changes under the hood, including systemd version 249.10, new versions of AppArmor, Dnf package manager, and CUPS printing system. Various updates for scripting and programming languages also aimed at developers.
In the form of Podman 4.4.4, CRI-O 1.22.0, and Containerd 1.6.19, Leap 15.5 comes with three updated runtime environments for Linux containers, making it a good platform for server administrators. The distribution also offers ONNX 1.6, Grafana, and Prometheus for artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
Initially, SUSE planned to make openSUSE Leap 15.5 the last version of the distribution based on the current technical basis. However, the company has announced that they will develop another version with version 15.6 with the previous technical basis. This means Leap users have time until the end of 2025 to choose between switching to ALP (or a Leap based on it) or looking for another distribution.
OpenSUSE Leap 15.5 can be downloaded from the openSUSE website, and users running Leap 15.4 can update directly using the distribution’s update functions.
