openSUSE Leap 15.5 is now available.

Leap 15.5 Release Matures, Sets Up Technological Transition

The release of  openSUSE’s latest 15-series version marks years of maintenance and security that began more than five years ago..

The maturity of  Leap 15.5 comes into play as new technological changes of the last five years have been introduced, such as container technologies, immutable systems, virtualization, embedded development, and other high-tech advances.

Entrepreneurs, hobbyists, professionals and developers use Leap as a go-to Linux distribution as seen by the  increase in usage from each minor release. Traversing from legacy software to more modern systems is imminent.

Leap 15.5, which is based on  SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5, will receive maintenance and security updates until the end of 2024. This will provide users with plenty of time to transition to the release’s successor; a successor has yet to be confirmed. Users interested in commercial support can use a  new tool to transition to commercial support. Leap can be downloaded at  get.opensuse.org.

This release brings newer packages like  Mesa and others, but  Leap 15.5 is a non-feature release. Some of these newer packages to highlight include KDE  Plasma 5.27, which is a Plasma Long Term Support version until the next one rolls out in 2024.  Konqi lovers will enjoy a new welcome wizard, dynamic customization of desktop workspaces and more functionality with  KRunner that includes a full desktop search, unit and currency exchange rate conversions, dictionary definitions, calculator features, and it shows graphical representations of mathematical functions. The Color Picker had a few improvements and added the possibility of displaying another preview color circle.  KDE Gear 22.12.3 will be a new package in the release and complement the use of  Plasma 5.27. The update fixes bugs with the Desktop Environment applications and highlights the enhancement of compression/decompression utility  ark, improvements to text editor  Kate and fixes some crashing of the video editor  Kdenlive. Qt 5.15 LTS is available with the  KDE Qt 5 patch collection.

Text editor  Vim will upgrade to a new major version.  Vim 9 has a new script language that drastically improves performance. Increases in execution speed of 10 to 100 times is expected for the text editor. Users are recommended to read the project’s  Vim 9.0 release information to know how the upgrade affects legacy scripts, backwards compatibility and other new features added in the release.

For professionals configuring networking of Linux containers, the  netavark 1.5.0 package is in the release. Users who have already transitioned to  Flatpaks will have an updated  1.14.4 version that addresses a  Common Vulnerability and Exposure with  CVE-2023-28101. The newer version fixes the hiding of permissions for an attacker publishing a Flatpak app with malicious intent to elevate permissions.

Leap 15.5 is set to have the  OpenH264 repository enabled by default for all new installations thanks to contributions from  Open Source at Cisco.

Leap 15.5 comes with  Linux Kernel 5.14.21 that including backports for this SUSE specific LTS kernel. Leap 15.5 shares the kernel with SLE 15 SP5 that receives the same fixes and backports along, which includes a few thousand other shared packages. The device firmware updater package  fwupd will change to version 1.8.6. The newer version fixes compiling errors when building for  s390x and  ppc64le

Good news for Python developers. Leap 15.5 users will have a fully usable Python 3.11 stack in parallel to the system Python (python36). This provides a more modern release for users and developers. Packagers are advised to switch to Python 3.11.

Other packages users may notice a change to are updates of  Ugrep 3.11.0 and  NetworkManager 1.38.6. Both  webkit2gtk3 and  webkit2gtk4 will update to version 2.38.5.  Mozilla’s internet browser  Firefox will get a new Extended Support Release version - 102.9.0.  Mozilla’s email client  Thunderbird gains various visual and user experience improvements with version 102.8.0.

Leap 15.5 Release Matures, Sets Up Technological Transition