The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.
As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company's annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.
The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.
The picture is complicated by the fact that there are two different openSUSE distributions: Leap and Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed is a rolling-release distro, akin to Arch Linux; there's no stable version, and new packages emerge from the project's Factory every day.
In contrast, Leap is one of the most stable distros available. Major releases appear approximately every few years, with a new minor or point release annually. Since the last point release, 15.3, the project has synchronized its codebase with the enterprise distro. This makes it possible to migrate an installation of openSUSE Leap to the paid SLE product and receive commercial support.
