The openSUSE Project released openSUSE Leap 42.3 today bringing the community version more closely aligned with its shared core of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack 3.

The mutual packages of both Leap and SLE distributions give seasoned Linux users, systems administrators, and developers even more reason to use the newest chameleon distribution.

Users are advised to take advantage of the seamless upgrade to Leap 42.3. Leap 42.2 reaches its end of maintenance in six months.

“By avoiding major version updates in the base system as well as the desktops, the upgrade to Leap 42.3 is a rather unadventurous matter,” said Ludwig Nussel, openSUSE Leap release manager.

The release of Leap 42.3 provides adopters a reliable server operating system for deploying IT services in physical, virtual or cloud environments.

Leap’s third edition of the 42 series has more than 10,000 packages and offers stability-minded users a refresh and hardware enablement release. The release is powered by the same Linux 4.4 Long-Term-Support (LTS) kernel found in the previous Leap edition.

Leap 42.3 continues to use KDE’s Long-Term-Support release 5.8 as the default desktop selection while also offering GNOME 3.20, the same as used by SUSE Linux Enterprise. A variety of additional desktops is available in the installer through the newly designed desktop selection.

“Leap 42.3 is the culmination of several years of effort integrating SUSE’s Enterprise codebase with the exceptional high-quality work of the openSUSE community,” said Richard Brown, Chairman of the openSUSE Project. “I’m exceptionally proud of what the openSUSE Project has achieved with Leap 42.3 and hope our users appreciate this stable, yet innovative, approach to community Linux, which can really be relied upon to work.”

This release of openSUSE Leap is well suited for servers thanks to its server installation profile and its fully-featured text mode installer, including all the options of YaST without a graphical environment.

System administrators are going to love the backup solution Borg, which now can be used easier than ever thanks to Borgmatic’s wrapper to automatically backup your data daily with a systemd service. Sysadmins will also like Samba’s System Security Services Daemon integration with an Active Directory.

Leap, and the openSUSE project, provides the DevOps tool chain developers need to be successful. Microservices with Leap offer scalability and continuous delivery through the availability of Docker and Kubernetes as well as easy configuration with Salt, Ansible, and other openSUSE technologies. AutoYaST’s new integration with SaltStack and other configuration management systems can take care of the system installation (partitioning, network setup, etc.) and then delegate the system configuration to one of those widely used external tools.

Developers, and businesses can take advantage of extensive core libraries found in Leap 42.3 to build or enhance software for enterprise use. Since Leap and SLE share a common core, development with packages on Leap for use in production on SLE has never been easier. Furthermore, system integrators can develop on Leap with the possibility of getting their work into future SLE releases.

Leap provides the tools, languages and libraries for sustainable software development and engineering. Enterprise ready versions of Python, Ruby, Perl, Go, Rust, Haskell and PHP are all available in Leap.

Updates to the kernel and graphics stack enable more hardware and provide stability and performance improvements.