openSUSE Leap and Leap Micro doubles down on support

openSUSE Leap and Leap Micro doubles down on support

openSUSE Leap 15 is a record breaker. It will keep receiving updates until April 30 2026, delivering a lengthy amount of unmatched community support.

The usual lifecycle is 12 months plus 6 months of overlap for a smooth upgrade, but Leap 15.6 has been stretched by an additional 4 months so we can maintain the familiar six month overlap after the release of Leap 16.0 in October 2025.

Altogether, Leap 15 delivered more than 1.5 times the typical 60 months of support offered by most long-term support distributions.

We are excited to announce that the record will not stand for long. Leap 16 will take things even further by supporting users with maintenance updates over two releases, giving each release a full 24 months of community support. Unless there is a strategic change the final, the Leap 16 release will go to 16.6 in Fall 2031 and it will keep receiving updates until Leap 17.1 arrives two years later.

Essentially the same applies to our immutable server distribution openSUSE Leap Micro, which is adopting the Leap 16 lifecycle and effectively becomes one of the Leap 16 appliances.

And for those who need even more than 24 months of support for a point release, the opensuse migration tool makes it simple to move to SUSE Linux Enterprise or SLE Micro where decades of support are available.

This long lifecycle is only possible because Leap keeps sharing its binary core with SUSE Linux Enterprise, which is also extending its general support to 24 months.

The long lifecycle of Leap 15 also brought some complaints that parts of the system became outdated. Leap 15.6 and the corresponding SLES refresh already solved many of the biggest pain points such as old versions of Ruby and system Python.

Learning from the past, openSUSE Leap 16 is better prepared. We plan to revisit the tic toc model and give product management more flexibility to deliver larger ecosystem updates when needed, rather than strictly enforcing a feature release followed by a maintenance release.

I believe this is GREAT NEWS for everyone looking for a free stable modern and predictable community-supported platform to base their solutions on.