openSUSE today announced the official and immediate availability for download of the latest and greatest update to the openSUSE Leap operating system series, version 42.3.
Based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack (SP) 3 enterprise-ready operating system, openSUSE Leap 42.3 is at best a hardware enablement release that includes hundreds of updated packages compared to the previous update, in this case openSUSE Leap 42.2, which arrived in mid-November last year.
More than eight months in development, openSUSE Leap 42.3 is finally here as the newest update to the rock-solid Leap distribution, powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series and including lots of well-tested components, but not necessary up to date (see below for details).
“The rock-solid Leap distribution also offers great packages for streaming media, playing games, editing graphics and creating animation, 3D printing projects, worldwide healthcare projects, data extraction, tools for high-performance computing, network monitoring and much more,” said openSUSE.
Here’s what’s new in openSUSE Leap 42.3
Prominent new features of the openSUSE Leap 42.3 release include KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS as default desktop environment, which is accompanied by the GNOME 3.20 desktop as well as other DEs that you can choose from the revamped desktop selection screen of the installer.
openSUSE Leap 42.3 is also a great release for servers, as it ships with a server installation profile and a fully-featured text mode installer, along with Borgmatic’s wrapper for the Borg backup solution to automatically backup your data every single day through the systemd 228 service.