The openSUSE Project has announced the arrival of openSUSE Leap 16, the first major Leap version update since 2018. It brings several updates and improvements to the community-developed edition of SUSE Linux Enterprise, including a new installation experience.

If you do a fresh install of Leap 16, you’ll be greeted with a brand-new installer experience, replacing the previous YaST distro install interface. In fact, the announcement notes that the entire YaST stack has been removed.

The new installer is called Agama, and it’s a “service-based” installer. Among its modernized features is the fact it can be remotely accessed on a different device using either a web browser or a command line. Let’s say you want to install openSUSE on a device that doesn’t have a monitor and other peripherals, like a Raspberry Pi in your server closet. Instead of setting up a temporary workstation at your Pi’s location, you can just type in Amaga’s address on your main desktop and complete installation from there.

After installing, you’ll also see an overhauled “Welcome” exprience. The new package is called “opensuse-welcome-launcher”, and the biggest benefit over the old opensuse-welcome application is the capablility of developers to update its display. The greeting can be regularly refreshed to show you notes about upgraded packages and other noteworthy happenings.

Getting down to the software you’ll be using, openSUSE Leap 16 comes with Linux kernel 6.12, the newest long-term support kernel available. If you want a desktop environment, you have GNOME 48, KDE Plasma 6.4, and Xfce 4.20 (with experimental Wayland support) to choose from. Wine 10.10 is here, meaning you can run more Windows applications on Leap 16.

NVIDIA graphics card owners should also take note, as openSUSE developers announced new automatic installation of NVIDIA’s open source hardware support:

On supported GPUs, NVIDIA’s open driver is installed by default along with the NVIDIA graphics driver repository. In openSUSE Leap 16, user-space drivers are also automatically installed, enabling graphical acceleration out of the box.

Another noteworthy change, and one that gamers might find annoying, is that the Steam package has been removed from Leap’s “Non-OSS” repository. This is due to Steam’s continued reliance on 32-bit libraries. The openSUSE Project recommends you install the Flatpak version of Steam instead. Flatpak applications come bundled with all of their required libraries, so even if you don’t have the 32-bit libraries Steam needs, you can keep running the Flatpak version just fine.

The developers noted that this is the first stable release with minimum requirements including an X86-64-v2 microarchitecture. Virtually any computer manufactured in 2008 or later is covered in that. If yours isn’t, the openSUSE Project recommends switching to Tumbleweed for continued support.

This release is a major milestone for the openSUSE Leap distribution. openSUSE 15 arrived on the scene a full seven years ago. The next major update, presumably called openSUSE Leap 17, won’t arrive until 2032. In the mean time, there will be annual point releases.

openSUSE has decided that the big 16 milestone calls for a party. If you’re reading this early enough, you can catch the release party livestream on Low Tech Linux’s YouTube channel at 6 PM Eastern time in the US.

Whether you’re attending the party or not, you can give openSUSE Leap 16 a try by heading to the Leap 16 download page. With the ISO in hand, you can spin up a VM or install it on bare metal. If you’re already running Leap 15.6, follow openSUSE’s official system upgrade guide.

Source: openSUSE News via 9to5 Linux