14 DAY TRIAL // The stable version of openSUSE Leap 42.1 has been announced by the openSUSE Project. This new version has been hailed as the best release until now, and users have been advised to upgrade as soon as possible.
openSUSE is definitely changing, and it looks like its developers want to live more on the edge than ever before. That's why the Tumbleweed is so important and people should be really excited about the improvements that are coming to this distribution.
openSUSE is one of the heavy hitters in the industry, and it's not all that surprising that it also needed to evolve.
The makers of this distro from the OpenSuSE Project have been extremely excited about the upcoming release, and they said right from the start that it's going to be an amazing release.
That remains to be seen after the current users will move to the new version, but it's clear it's not the same openSUSE we knew. The new version is not named Leap just for show; it's actually a big leap for them and it's reflected in the OS.
openSUSE 42.1 is being called a hybrid
openSUSE is aptly named a hybrid, but that has nothing to do with the hybrid feature that you can find for some Live CD distros.
The developers are talking about the fact that more packages are being pulled from the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), which will make this operating system a lot more stable, at least in theory.
"Version 42.1 is the first version of openSUSE Leap that uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) providing a level of stability that will prove to be unmatched by other Linux distributions. Bonding community development and enterprise reliability provides more cohesion for the project and its contributor’s maintenance updates. openSUSE Leap will benefit from the enterprise maintenance effort and will have some of the same packages and updates as SLE, which is different from previous openSUSE versions that created separate maintenance streams," wrote the developers.
The new openSUSE 42.1 integrates KDE Plasma 5.x, LibreOffice 5.x, GNOME 3.16, GCC 5.2, and uses the Btrfs filesystem as default, with an XFS data filesystem for performance. Users can download the latest version of openSUSE can be downloaded from Softpedia. It's not a live CD, so you'll have to install it to test it.