/opensuse/

openSUSE

openSUSE is a community project, sponsored by SUSE, that builds Linux distributions and the tooling around them. The project is older than most people realise. SUSE Linux dates back to the early 1990s, and openSUSE was created in 2005 to open up its development to the community. SUSE itself has changed hands several times since, from Novell to Attachmate to Micro Focus and back to being an independent company, but the relationship has held. SUSE sponsors the infrastructure and employs many contributors, while the community elects its own Board and steers the project.

Beyond the distributions, the project maintains tools that the wider Linux world relies on. The Open Build Service builds packages for openSUSE and for other distributions, and openQA tests every snapshot and release automatically before it reaches users. The mascot is a chameleon named Geeko, and the openSUSE name and logo are registered trademarks of SUSE.

My work with openSUSE

I have contributed to the openSUSE Project since 2009. I began in the ambassador programme, representing openSUSE at events in Mauritius, and my first talk in the open source arena was at an openSUSE Installfest at the University of Mauritius. Over the years I served on the Election Committee, which runs the Board elections, and on the Membership Committee, which reviews applications from contributors who want to become openSUSE members. In 2025 the community elected me to the openSUSE Board.

I maintain the youki package, a container runtime written in Rust, and I have spoken about openSUSE at four openSUSE Conferences in Nuremberg, Germany, at the openSUSE Asia Summit in Bali, Indonesia, at the Africa Internet Summit in Kampala, Uganda, and at the SUSE Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Closer to home, I set up the two openSUSE mirrors in Mauritius, mirror.opensuse.mu hosted by cloud.mu and mirror.rcts.opensuse.mu hosted by Rogers Capital Technology Services, with the opensuse.mu domain sponsored by the project itself. Anyone updating an openSUSE machine on the island is routed to them automatically, with nothing to configure. I write about all of this regularly, and you can follow along under the openSUSE tag.

The distributions

openSUSE is one project with several distributions. The two you will meet first are Leap and Tumbleweed, and the choice between them comes down to how often you want things to change.

Leap

Leap is the regular release. It shares its core with SUSE Linux Enterprise, so it gets the same well-tested base, with a new major version every few years and minor updates in between. Leap 16.0 is the current release and introduces the new Agama installer. If you want a system you install once and leave alone, on a laptop, a workstation or a server, Leap is the one. It is also what I run in production, and I wrote a short guide on running Leap 16.0 on Google Cloud Platform.

Tumbleweed

Tumbleweed is the rolling release. There are no versions, only snapshots, and each snapshot ships once it has passed openQA. You get the latest kernel, desktop and toolchain within days of their upstream releases, with the safety net of Btrfs snapshots and a rollback if something goes wrong. It is the distribution for people who want new software and enjoy keeping up with it.

The specialised distributions

Around Leap and Tumbleweed, the project builds a set of more specialised distributions, most of them immutable. Immutable here means the root filesystem is read-only and updates are applied as atomic transactions that only take effect after a reboot, so a system either updates completely or not at all.

MicroOS is the immutable base, built from Tumbleweed. It is designed for containers, servers and edge devices, updates itself unattended and rolls back on its own if a boot fails. I gave a talk on running MicroOS in production at the openSUSE Conference in 2019 and ran workshops on it in Kampala and Bali the same year.
Aeon takes the MicroOS foundation to the desktop with GNOME. Everything you install lives in Flatpaks or containers, and the base system stays untouched.
Kalpa is the KDE Plasma counterpart to Aeon, the same immutable base with the Plasma desktop on top.
Slowroll sits between Leap and Tumbleweed. It is built from Tumbleweed but takes a new base only every month or two, with bug and security fixes in between, for people who want a rolling release at a calmer pace.
Leap Micro is the immutable sibling of Leap, aimed at hosts that only need to run containers and virtual machines.

Get openSUSE

The simplest way to download is get.opensuse.org, which picks the mirror closest to you. If you are in Mauritius, that will be one of the local mirrors, and you can also fetch the images from them directly:

The live images let you try Tumbleweed without touching your disk. The DVD and network installers can install a fresh system or upgrade an existing one. Verify the checksum before you write the image to a USB stick, and if anything trips you up, the openSUSE forums and the documentation are the places to look first.