With changes to SUSE over its history, the official chameleon logo seems pretty appropriate. In 2015, the openSUSE project restructured, creating two versions: Leap and Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed is a rolling release, so users always have access to the newest Linux packages, and Leap is openSUSE’s regular-release, with guaranteed stability.
In his “My Move to SUSE” presentation at the 2017 openSUSE Conference, SaltStack CEO Thomas Hatch says, “I lived in a two distro world. I needed a different distro for my laptop than for the servers in the data center.” With Leap and Tumbleweed, however, Hatch says he has a rolling release as well as a free OS that’s more than sufficiently stable to run the vast majority of his server needs.
Hatch also believes SUSE has the best release policies and release cycles among all Linux distros. “The world of open source is a rolling world. Not having a rolling release that is stabilized means that your users must always be behind the curve. And Tumbleweed solves it in a way which is infinitely more elegant than any other rolling release.”
He adds, “Having an open source release which is stable enough to run in a server environment is an extremely important aspect of a Linux distribution. And deploying that piece of software in such a way that enables users to get to know SUSE and get to know what an enterprise and an extremely stable SUSE environment feels like is a smart business model.”
