openSUSE Leap has entered into the beta release phase today for its 15.3 minor version.
This openSUSE Leap 15.3 version is a solidified release that focuses more on the building of the distribution rather than refreshing the distribution?s packages, but there are some significant changes to the distribution.
Many of the packages will remain the same as those in openSUSE Leap 15.2 with a bit of hardware enablement and security backports. An updated version of glibc brings some Power10 support and the Xfce desktop users will have the new 4.16 version. The distribution also gains adds s390x architecture.
The biggest change for this release is how Leap is built and its relationship with SUSE Linux Enterprise. Leap transitioned to a new way of building openSUSE Leap releases in the fall of 2020 through a prototype project called Jump. The Jump prototype was used as a proof of concept, but no longer exists; it did prove to work at building a distribution and bringing the code streams of both openSUSE Leap and SLE closer together. The proof of concept was implemented for building the release of openSUSE Leap 15.3 as seen in the beta release today. Building Leap on top of binary packages from SLE, which was part of the rationale for the Jump prototype, allows for easy development on a community release to be put into production on an enterprise release should the need arise.
