Entering RC Phase

openSUSE Leap 16.0 has officially transitioned from Beta into the Release Candidate phase with the Build 148.4.

The biggest challenge for the Release Team prior to Autumn release is source code management, as we want to transition both Tumbleweed and Leap 16.0 from legacy OBS SCM to Git.
This will also require a new maintenance model for Leap.

Users can expect a few more builds before we announce our Gold Master candidate.
Given the nature of Leap 16 being built on top of binaries from SUSE Linux Enterprise 16, we can only do so once SUSE Linux Enterprise 16.0 announces their Gold Master in late September.

If all goes well with the maintenance setup we could aim for the delivery according to the roadmap in October shortly before SLES 16.0.

More details can be found in the roadmap and newly also in calendar.opensuse.org.

New installer

Leap 16.0 is using the latest Agama for both online and offline installation aside. You can get install images at get.opensuse.org. Alternatively, users can pick one of our appliance images.

Being among the first to deliver Xfce on Wayland

We offer only Wayland-based Desktop Environments in the installer. Xfce on Wayland has recently joined the list.
Thanks to the openSUSE Xfce team, we’re among the first to deliver it as an experimental preview to users.
The Xfce mailing list was quite active as we were getting closer to RC.

Users can enjoy the minimalistic Wayland-friendly greetd and gtkgreet as a replacement for LightDM.

Get the Leap 16.0 install image and try it out!

Please be aware that the Wayland support in Xfce is experimental and there are plenty of issues.
We could use help in improving our patterns and making the experience with Wayland-ready apps on Xfce more complete.
Join the Xfce mailing list if you’re interested in the effort.

YaST stack reduction

A clean install of Leap 16.0 comes with no YaST packages installed.
Users can use the new package Myrlyn, which is a drop-in replacement for legacy YaST Software Management, which provided a bit more than just a nice UI frontend to Zypper.
Some limited set of YaST packages will still be around as Agama depends on them, therefore they won’t be dropped on migration.
The long-term goal is to go in favor of Cockpit.

SELinux is the new default

All new installations will use SELinux by default.
Users can switch to AppArmor post installation.

Steam, Wine, 32-bit support

SUSE Linux Enterprise 16.0 does not support 32-bit binary execution.
Leap users can install grub2-compat-ia32, which enables it by passing ia32_emulation=1 to the kernel.
We’ve recently dropped Steam from the Non-OSS repository due to a limited set of 32-bit libraries.
Steam users will want to install selinux-policy-targeted-gaming, which is not installed by default.

New Repository structure and parallel downloads in zypper

The biggest changes for users migrating from 15.6 will likely be the absence of dedicated update repositories for SLES packages.
Leap 16.0 essentially uses just a single repository repo-oss that contains both community and SLES packages and their respective updates.
We now use separate repodata per architecture, as well as parallel downloads in Zypper for a more “snap” user experience.

Migration

I personally advise Leap 15.6 users migrating to 16.0 to look into the new opensuse-migration-tool.
The tool has some useful optional post-migration scripts such as 32-bit binary enablement, migration from PulseAudio to PipeWire, and AppArmor/SELinux selection.

sudo zypper in opensuse-migration-tool opensuse-migration-tool --dry-run # optionally check how it looks sudo opensuse-migration-tool 

Users migrating manually will want to drop all update repositories and keep only oss/non-oss repos prior to running zypper --releasever 16.0 dup.
Details are at our System upgrade wiki page.

Revamped release notes

A preview of our new modular release-notes can be found here.
We were able to reduce the build/publish infrastructure for Release Notes to basically just GitHub, as the installer no longer requires an RPM with a local copy of release notes.

Submitting Bug Reports

Your feedback is critical at this stage.

We know that people really start testing new release with RC. Please report any issues on bugzilla.opensuse.org.

Thank you for testing and being part of the openSUSE community. Let’s shape Leap 16.0 together!

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