During the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference, there were 2 presentations on what’s next for openSUSE Leap. These presentations also touched on Closing the Leap Gap. This is a project which tries to resolve / minimize the differences in packages between openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), by unifying the code base and the development process. More details on this project can be found here.

On the 20th October, there was a Go-No Go decision to be made. This decision is documented on the wiki, the engineering release notes and on the openSUSE Factory mailing list. There was a Conditional No Go given on the proposal to create an in-between release called openSUSE Leap 15.2.1. That means that the Jump and Leap unification will most likely happen in Leap 15.3. I think that this is a reasonable decision, which provides a better timeline for the openSUSE and SUSE teams to work out all of the outstanding issues.

As an openSUSE Leap user you will likely not notice any change. Things in Leap will continue to work just fine. But from Leap 15.3, the migration from Leap to SLE will be much easier to make. This means that openSUSE Leap will become a direct competitor to CentOS in terms of being an Enterprise Grade Linux Distribution. And for SLE customers, it will be much safer to use (Leap) community packages on top of SLE.

Published on: 22 October 2020

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