The upcoming openSUSE Leap 15.3 RC is released for developers and testers. We round up the changes and give you the details on the download.
openSUSE Linux distribution is used by millions of users worldwide across general desktops, enterprise deployments, and servers. The openSUSE Leap is the long-term support (LTS) version of this distro while openSUSE Tumbleweed is the tested-rolling-release distribution. The leap series is rock-solid and is ideal for a variety of users. openSUSE Leap can easily compete with Ubuntu Linux operating system in terms of flexibility and ease of use.
openSUSE project announced the release candidate of its upcoming long-term support release Leap 15.3 aligning with its schedule. Let’s take a look at what’s new.
openSUSE Leap 15.3 RC – What’s New
In this stable long-term release, you get Linux Kernel 5.3.18. This version of the Linux Kernel is already end-of-life (EOL) as per the mainline Kernel schedule. This Kernel is used today in SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3. The openSUSE 15.3 is binary compatible with SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3. Although this version of the Kernel is EOL, it is currently maintained separately by the SUSE team.
Leap 15.3 can support a wide range of hardware architectures such as x86_64, aarch64, PowerPC (ppc64le), and s390x. You can easily deploy Leap 15.3 on physical, virtual, host and guest, and cloud machines.
openSUSE primarily provides KDE Plasma, GNOME, and Xfce desktops for desktop users. However, being a stable distro, you get a little bit older version of these desktops with openSUSE Leap except Xfce. So, you get KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS with Frameworks 5.76.0, GNOME 3.34, and Xfce 4.16 in this release. Remember, all these desktops are maybe older from their respective upstream versions, but they are super stable.
If you are into tiling window managers, openSUSE leap also provides the Wayland compositor Sway as well.
This release also introduces several Artificial Intelligence packages as well. The deep learning framework Tensorflow, library PyTorch, open-source AI framework ONNX are included.
If you are using openSUSE for health work, scientific research, etc, then you get the GNU health, QGIS for various work. It also includes two analytics tools Grafana and Prometheus.
With the above tools, your workflow is powered by the latest LibreOffice 7.1.1 stable office suite. So you can seamlessly work on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
A quick summary of popular applications and their versions in openSUSE Leap 15.3.
- LibreOffice 7.1.1
- Thunderbird 78.7.1
- Roundcube 1.3.15
- Chromium 89
- Firefox’s Extended Support Release (ESR) 78.7.1
- Python 3.6.12
More details available in the Changelog.
Download
You can download the openSUSE Leap 15.3 RC from the below link.
openSUSE comes with separate installer images for Server, desktop, and minimal network install. You can also get separate desktop environment images.
If you have a stable internet connection, download the network image and install any desktop environment during live installation. Or else, you can separately download the entire offline image/separate desktop image from the above link.
Once downloaded, you can install them in the virtual machine or in a physical system.
OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 released on June 2, 2021. And it will be supported until the next successor arrives.
So, download and test this release candidate. Dont forget to report bugs at BugZilla.
