openSUSE offers Leap, an LTS-style distribution that shares the code base SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), effectively making Leap a non-commercial version of its enterprise-grade operating system. Users that prefer more up-to-date free software can use its rolling release distribution Tumbleweed. Users can also use the Open Build Service. Moreover, the flexibility of openSUSE makes it easy to re-purpose for specific goals like running a web- or mail server.

Like most Linux distributions, openSUSE includes both a default graphical user interface (GUI) and a command line interface option. Users of openSUSE may choose several desktops environments GUIs like GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt, Xfce. openSUSE supports thousands of software packages across the full range of free software / open source development.

How is Leap different from openSUSE Tumbleweed?

Leap follows a fixed release cycle with regular updates and security patches, focusing on stability and tested packages. Tumbleweed, on the other hand, is a rolling release that always delivers the latest software versions but may be less stable.

Can I use openSUSE Leap for professional or enterprise environments?

Yes, Because Leap shares its code base with SUSE Linux Enterprise, it offers enterprise-grade stability and compatibility. This makes it suitable for production servers, cloud deployments, and business desktops.

What is YaST and why is it important in Leap?

YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) is openSUSE's system management framework. It provides both graphical and command-line tools to configure almost every aspect of the system, including network, storage, software repositories, virtualization, and security settings.

Can I upgrade from one Leap version to the next without reinstalling?

Yes, openSUSE Leap supports online upgrades. You can update repositories to the new version and use zypper to perform a system upgrade. However, it's recommended to carefully read the official release notes and back up important data before upgrading.

System Requirements

  • 2 Ghz dual core processor or better
  • For x86_64: microarchitecture level x86-64-v2 or higher
  • For ppc64le: POWER9 or higher
  • For s390x: z14 or higher
  • 2GB physical RAM + additional memory for your workload
  • Over 40GB of free hard drive space
  • Either a DVD drive or USB port for the installation media
  • Internet access is helpful, and required for the Network Installer

The operating system is compatible with a wide variety of hardware on numerous instruction sets including Arm-based single-board computers. Examples include the Raspberry Pi 3 and Pine64 on the ARMv8 platform also known as aarch64, the Banana Pi and BeagleBoard on the ARMv7 instruction set, and the first iteration of the Raspberry Pi on the ARMv6 ISA. RISC-V, PowerPC (PPC64 and PPC64le) and S390 are supported as well.

Many desktops, three by default

The openSUSE contribution process empowers desktop development for everybody, so you have the choice to pick your favourite one in the installer. We actively feature three desktop environments, and offer even more in the expanded software view within the installer.

Everything is transparent

From start to finish, every package which goes into the distributions has all of its sources and build scripts openly visible for everyone to see. Doubtful of a source? Just check it out on the build service.

Free software? Your choice

Packages in the distributions are divided into free and non-free repositories. Don't want to use non-free packages? You can easily disable the non-free repository. It's your choice, not ours.

Welcoming contributions

We try our best to please the community, and we can only make this happen when the community is vocal about what they need. That's why we ensure contributing is as easy as possible.

YaST, the best choice for the user

One of the greatest system configuration tools helps you, the user, to setup every single aspect of your system. You no longer need to go through a plethora of configuration scripts or enter dubious commands to get the system setup as you need it.

The goals of the openSUSE project are:

  • Make openSUSE the easiest Linux distribution for anyone to obtain and the most widely used open source platform.
  • Provide an environment for open source collaboration that makes openSUSE the world's best Linux distribution for new and experienced Linux users.
  • Dramatically simplify and open the development and packaging processes to make openSUSE the platform of choice for Linux hackers and application developers.

With the launch of the openSUSE project, openSUSE is now developed in an open model - public development builds, releases, and sources will be posted frequently here and you will have access to our Bugzilla database for defect reporting. You can also sign up on special interest mailing lists to make sure that you are always getting the most recent news on the openSUSE project and the openSUSE distribution.

openSUSE tools:

  • Open Build Service (OBS)
    • Our build tool, building all of our packages as well as ones for SUSE Linux Enterprise, Arch, Debian, Fedora, Scientific Linux, RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, and more.
  • openQA
    • Automated testing for *any* operating system, that can read the screen and control the test host the same way a user does.
  • YaST
    • The best/only comprehensive Linux system configuration & installation tool.
  • Kiwi
    • Create Linux images for deployment on real hardware, virtualization, and now even container systems like Docker. Kiwi is the engine that builds the openSUSE release images.

What's New

There were several software package updates for openSUSE Tumbleweed during April and the later half of the month brought some urgency with Copy Fail, which is now safe for users of the rolling release and Slowroll for those who have done a zypper dup at the end of the month.

The information about affected flavors of openSUSE was covered in a blog by the security team.

April brought a major desktop release of GNOME 50 and there was a fourth Plasma 6.6 point release. PHP, GTK4 with the new native GtkSvg renderer, SQLite, iproute2, and nano were among some of the develop packages updated this month. The Linux kernel advances to 7.0.2, and Mesa progressed through 26.0.4 and 26.0.5 with raytracing fixes ahead of upcoming game releases. Security received heavy attention with WebKitGTK, Python, CUPS, Flatpak, sudo, and OpenEXR all receiving multiple Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures fixes.

New Features and Enhancements

KDE Gear 26.04.0: This major release updates 129 packages from the 25.12.3 series across the core PIM suite (Akonadi, KMail, Kontact, KOrganizer), graphics tools (Gwenview, Okular), development tools (Kate, Kompare, Umbrello), and system utilities (Dolphin, Konsole, Kleopatra). Dolphin prevents re-entrant signal activation across multiple view states, and Ark prevents silent replacement of existing files by directory entries during extraction. Okular avoids processing HTML with QDomDocument and improves certificate selection, and kdegraphics-thumbnailers addresses multiple crashes for malformed files. Infrastructure-wide changes include CMake modernization, a port to QDoc documentation, and migration toward modern C++ patterns such as std::shared_ptr over QSharedPointer. The companion ktextaddons library jumps from 1.8.0 to 2.0.1.

KDE Frameworks 6.25.0: This release emphasizes code quality, memory safety, and developer experience. KIO reverts a problematic permissions-based readability check, restores proper FTP UTF-8 negotiation, fixes WebDAV copy/move headers, and resolves multiple memory leaks across file operations and preview jobs. KCodecs streamlines encoding detection with safer initialization, improved codec lookup performance, and removes obsolete code since Qt 6.8+ is required.Kirigami enhances component reliability by preventing dialog layer leaks and adds a configurable textFormat property to TitleSubtitle, while Breeze Icons expands the icon set with new status icons. KTextEditor improves document handling by using the first line as a fallback title and adding relevant MIME types to save dialogs.

GNOME 50 for developers: This release brings significant improvements to the development stack. Builder gains a new save delegate system for better draft handling, refined dark theme colors matching the Adwaita palette, and more integrated help documentation. Flatpak support now moves deleted files to the trash, the LSP client better handles delete notifications, and the build pipeline supports more flexible post-install commands. Mutter Devkit receives a major feature expansion including HiDPI and fractional scaling simulation, multi-monitor support within a single session, clipboard integration between host and Devkit, and resizable virtual displays with emulated monitor modes – reducing the need for physical multi-monitor test setups. GTK 4.22 introduces GtkSvg, a new native in-process SVG renderer integrated with the GTK Scene Graph that supports SVG animations, passes over 1,250 tests in the resvg test suite, and maintains 60fps+ performance for trusted system icons and application resources (untrusted SVGs should still use the sandboxed Glycin library). Libadwaita 1.9 introduces new sidebar widgets including AdwSidebar and AdwViewSwitcherSidebar (replacing GtkStackSidebar), automatic support for the system-wide reduced motion preference across most widgets, context menus on AdwAboutDialog link rows, and GTK_DEBUG=builder diagnostics for all standard widgets. Autoloaded style resources are deprecated in favor of standard CSS media queries.

GDM 50.0: The most significant change for this in the GNOME 50 release is the complete removal of X11 support for GDM's own sessions, which now always run on Wayland. Features like XDMCP and the system-wide Xserver are gone, though launching other desktops' X11 sessions via per-user X servers is still possible. Compiling GDM without Wayland support is no longer possible. With systemd v260+, remote desktop sessions and local background sessions are now granted GPU access, enabling accelerated graphics for remote sessions on distributions that restrict GPU device node permissions. service simplifies starting headless graphical sessions for RDP purposes. The gdm/gdm3' user is no longer needed since GDM now fully relies on dynamically allocated users. Wtmp/utmp/btmp records now contain more useful values, especially for Wayland and headless RDP sessions.

Plasma 6.6.4: KWin fixes blur flickering after wobbly windows, improves startup feedback icon clarity, resolves crashes with accessibility keyboards, and enhances pointer scaling and key repeat handling on Wayland. The Oxygen theme addresses pixelated buttons under fractional scaling, restores missing menu shadows, and adds a missing switch SVG. Usability improvements include better RTL support in Kicker, proper drag initiation only after pointer movement, and refined shortcut conflict prevention in keyboard settings. Plasma Keyboard hardens virtual input handling with UTF-8 length fixes and disables predictive text during capture. Other fixes improve Discover by correcting how it tracks the number of active transactions, Dr Konqi with more reliable crash debugging, and Spectacle with a workaround for an overlay issue introduced in Qt 6.11. Several system tray and menu rendering glitches across multiple applets are also resolved, resulting in a smoother and more resilient desktop experience.

w3m 0.5.6: This is a major update for the terminal web browser. New features include commands to scroll the current line to top/bottom, a change directory (CD) command, a vim-like smartcase search option, recognition of aria-label for buttons, gopher protocol support, and experimental session store and restore. The image display in the kitty terminal is fixed, and slow backward search in long lines is improved.

LibreOffice 26.2.2.2: This is a major version upgrade with completely new features, improvements, and bug fixes across Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math, and Base. Detailed release notes are available at The Document Foundation wiki. Bundled components are refreshed including PDFium updated from 7012 to 7471 and 2D Graphics Library Skia updated from milestone 136 to 142.

SDL3 3.4.2: This update adds SDL_HINT_OPENGL_FORCE_SRGB_FRAMEBUFFER to control sRGB behavior for OpenGL and OpenGL ES contexts. A long startup time on Windows caused by non-compliant input devices was fixed, along with a divide-by-zero when using Nintendo Switch 2 controllers and improved GameCube adapter handling in PC mode. Support for the Razer Raiju V5 Pro is added.

cryptsetup 2.8.6: This update has several disk encryption fixes. The resumed device UUID is now verified against the UUID stored in metadata, and the LUKS2 reencryption lock name was corrected. FileVault (fvault2) metadata parsing is fixed, including reading from the correct image offset. The OpenSSL crypto backend works again when built with LibreSSL and allows up to 64 concurrent threads.

Mozilla Firefox 149.0.2: This update addresses multiple security vulnerabilities, including integer overflow and memory safety bugs in Graphics: Text and Graphics: WebGPU components. The update also includes enterprise-related features such as AI-feature management, prevention of built-in VPN and IP protection, and correct application of browser homepage and start page policies. Other fixes include resolution of layout issues with graphics (SVG), crash prevention for security keys and WebAuthn features, and improved handling of web page printing and website error pages. Additionally, the build process is updated to be compatible with clang-based building on Leap, with the necessary libraries specified. [Linux]

PHP 8.5.5: This minor version bump from the 8.4 series brings numerous bug fixes across the core, DOM, Opcache, and OpenSSL modules. Notable fixes address JIT compiler arithmetic errors, memory leaks, and use-after-free vulnerabilities. The package now requires libcapstone as a dependency.

nano 9.0: This is a major version bump for the popular terminal text editor. The release improves horizontal scrolling, changes how macro recording is handled, and brings other usability refinements that build on the 8.x series.

iproute2 7.0: A major version bump for the Linux network configuration toolkit. New features include CAN XL support and DPLL mode setting, both of which extend networking and timing capabilities for newer hardware platforms.

iw 6.17: This wireless configuration tool sees a significant jump from 6.9. It adds support for WPA3 SAE association, EHT rate and bitrate handling for Wi-Fi 7, multi-radio RTS configuration, and endianness fixes across the wireless stack.

GIMP 3.2.4: This minor update to the GNU Image Manipulation Program continues the 3.2 series with bug fixes and incremental improvements following the 3.2.2 release.

xterm 407: New private modes for UTF-8 and character width reporting are introduced, and Unicode handling and window resizing functionality are improved.

gnome-remote-desktop 50.1: This minor update to the GNOME 50 release fixes a black-screen issue when using NVIDIA GPUs.