Igeekphone News, May 1st: Technology media linuxiac published a blog post today (May 1st), reporting that the Beta version of openSUSE Leap 16 has now been released. This distribution is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 and SUSE Linux Framework One (formerly known as ALP), equipped with Kernel 6.12. The final stable version is expected to be launched in mid-October.
Compared with Leap 15.x, the 16 Beta released this time has a relatively large update. It fully embraces Wayland as the sole session option and only retains a small number of X Servers for compatibility with edge scenarios. Meanwhile, the system completely abandons SysV init, making systemd the core and making the system operation more streamlined and efficient.
Igeekphone quoted a blog post as saying that the Leap 16 Beta version introduces a brand-new web version of the Agama installer as the default choice. This media outlet conducted a test and found that although Agama is still under development (currently version 13), its performance in this Beta version is astonishing, with a smooth and barrier-free installation process.
Leap 16 Beta also abandoned the classic YaST graphical front-end and switched to Myrlyn (a graphical package manager) and Cockpit 334 (a daily system management tool). Myrlyn focuses on software management with simple and efficient operation, while Cockpit offers a modern management experience.
In terms of software, the Leap 16 Beta version has upgraded almost all software components to the latest version. Including GNOME 48.0 (target 48.1), KDE Plasma 6.3.4 (planned to be upgraded to 6.4.0), GIMP 3.0 stable version, AppArmor 4.1 and RPM 4.20, etc.
In terms of security, the new version enables SELinux by default. Users can also choose the AppArmor package maintained by the community. Switching can be achieved with just a few commands. It is worth noting that in order to improve the overall performance, Leap 16 eliminates the old 64-bit CPU and requires a minimum architecture of x86_64-v2.