A minor update after openSUSE 15.5, but with a couple of significant improvements.
With this release, openSUSE brings in some goodness of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 6. And, they also plan to have an update for Service Pack 7 later this year before Leap 16 arrives in 2025.
So, what's new?
🆕openSUSE Leap 15.6: Refining The Essentials
While openSUSE is already good at what it does, with Leap 15.6, they added refinements to the management capabilities along with other package updates.
The key highlights include 🌟
Cockpit package integration
Upgrades to Container and Virtualization technologies
Software Upgrades
Desktop Environment updates
Cockpit Integration
A new package (Cockpit) was integrated with openSUSE Leak 15.6 which helps enhance the system and container management.
You get a web-based interface for system administration, and other advanced operations using this package.
A tool integration like this should make things easy, and let professionals do more with openSUSE.
Containers and Virtualization
The release includes Podman 4.8, which comes with enhancements to manage containers like Nextcloud application. Along with this, Distrobox, Docker, Skipeo, and a couple of other packages also received updates.
On the virtualization side, you can find Xen 4.18, KVM 8.2.2, libvirt 10.0, and virt-manager 4.1.
Software and Desktop Environment Upgrades
As usual, with every release, you can expect updates to the Linux Kernel and other essential packages. These include:
Linux Kernel 6.4
OpenSSL 3.1
MariaDB 10.11.6
PHP 8.2
Node.js 20
PostgreSQL 16
PulseAudio 17.0
PipeWire 1.0.4
For the graphical desktop experience, it features KDE Plasma 5.27.11 and GNOME 45 along with Qt6 version.
📋
Python 3.11 update removes many unmaintained Python packages.
Get openSUSE Leap 15.6
You can head over to the official site to get the ISO.
