We’re delighted to announce a new project in the openSUSE Project family called openSUSE Step. openSUSE Step is a community effort to rebuild SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) from the released SLE sources packages. This is done openly in the openSUSE instance of the Open Build Service (OBS) with the intention to stay fully binary compatible and to be as closely source-compatible as possible with SLE.
openSUSE Leap 15.3 inherits its base from SLE 15 SP3. On aarch64, powerpc64, and x86_64, openSUSE directly uses binary packages from the enterprise side. In addition, openSUSE also supports architectures that SLE does not provide, such as armv7hl and 32-bit x86, which is relatively popular with openSUSE users, according to results from a recent community survey. For those, we now build fully compatible binary packages from the published SLE sources in OBS.
openSUSE Step is not intended to be an end user distribution. It does not replace, or provide an alternative to openSUSE Leap. Step is an intermediate building block (“step”) to enable derived community distributions like openSUSE Leap or other community derivatives.
