The development of Opensuse Leap 16.0 distribution has been announced, incorporating technologies from the latest branch of the Sles 16 commercial distribution and transitioning to the SLFO (SUSE Linux Framework One). This new branch aims to combine traditional distribution capabilities with innovative SLFO technologies, utilizing packages from Sles 16 and supported by the community repository factory . The installation process involves a new Agama installer.
Opensuse Leap 16.0 is scheduled to be released in October 2025. The upcoming release will be the last of the 15.X branch, with access to packages from Sles 15 SP7 available through PACKAGE HUB. An alpha version of Opensuse Leap 16.0 has been assembled for testing, offering three installation modes: basic, gnome, and kde.
The SLFO platform is positioned as an extension of SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution, featuring a compartmentalized “Host OS” environment for essential components, while applications and user space components run in isolated containers or virtual machines on top of the “Host OS”.
Noteworthy features of the SLFO environment include full disk encryption (FDE) with the option to store keys in TPM, read-only root section mounting, atomic update installation, BTRFS snapshot mechanism for system reversion, and multi-versioned software stack support through containerization.