Dear openSUSE community,
On behalf of the release engineering team, we are are thrilled to share
news of the release of openSUSE Leap 15.5. This release represents the
culmination of many hours of hard work and collaboration from our
dedicated community members like you. We extend our heartfelt gratitude
and hope you enjoy this release.
Please note that we do plan to have a Leap 15.6. You can find that news,
which was published yesterday, at
https://news.opensuse.org/2023/06/06/leap-15.6-annoucement/
You can celebrate this release with others throughout the day by joining
the openSUSE Bar at https://meet.opensuse.org/bar.
The following release announcement of Leap 15.5 can be found on
news.opensuse.org
NUREMBERG, Germany – 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.
End of Life
openSUSE Leap 15.4 will have its End of Life (EOL) six months from
today’s release. Users should update to openSUSE Leap 15.5 within six
months of today to continue to receive security and maintenance updates.
Important for users upgrading from previous versions
A new 4096-bit RSA signing key was introduced as part of openSUSE Leap
15.5 as well as 15.4 via a maintenance update. Leap 15.4 users are
expected to update their system prior to upgrade of 15.5. For more
information, visit
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:System_upgrade#0._New_4096_bit_RSA_signing_key
Download Leap 15.5
To download the ISO image, visit https://get.opensuse.org/leap/
Questions
If you have a question about the release or found a bug, we’d love to
hear from you at:
https://t.me/openSUSEhttps://chat.opensuse.orghttps://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-support/https://discordapp.com/invite/openSUSEhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/opensuseproject
Get involved
The openSUSE Project is a worldwide community that promotes the use of
Linux everywhere. It creates two of the world’s best Linux
distributions, the Tumbleweed rolling-release, and Leap, the hybrid
enterprise-community distribution. openSUSE is continuously working
together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the
worldwide Free and Open Source Software community. The project is
controlled by its community and relies on the contributions of
individuals, working as testers, writers, translators, usability
experts, artists and ambassadors or developers. The project embraces a
wide variety of technology, people with different levels of expertise,
speaking different languages and having different cultural backgrounds.
Learn more about it on opensuse.org.
Hello openSUSE!
We’d like to announce that the openSUSE Release team plans to work on
openSUSE Leap 15.6.
openSUSE Leap 15.6 is expected to be released in early June 2024 and
would reach its end of life by the end of the year 2025.
This decision was based on recent discussions at SUSE Labs and openSUSE
Conference, and it reflects recent changes, progress on individual
projects, and our new distribution *architect.
This will also enable us to provide SUSE customers with an updated
Package HUB module, as both SLES 15 SP5 and Leap 15.6 would be
considered a feature release based on our *tick-tock release model.
With a Leap 15.6, more time is given for efforts related to an ALP-
based Leap 15.X *successor.
A more detailed explanation of the situation at lkocman’s oSC2023 “Leap
16.0?” talk. Recording should be available within a few days at the
openSUSE youtube *channel.
Related news-o-o article:
https://news.opensuse.org/2023/06/06/leap-15.6-annoucement/
[0]https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/factory@lists.opensuse.org/threa…
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model
[2]https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/factory@lists.opensuse.org/threa…
[3]https://www.youtube.com/@openSUSE
Thank you!
Lubos Kocman
on behalf of the openSUSE Release team
