Curiously, the next version won’t be called SLE 13. Instead, SUSE has decided to unify the version numbers of its three products—SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and openSUSE Leap—and jump straight to 15, skipping the numbers 13 and 14 because they are considered unlucky in western and eastern cultures respectively.
Release Date
The release of the Gold Master Candidate (GMC) of SLE 15 is planned at the end of May 2018, and it will coincide with the release of openSUSE Leap 15, which is scheduled to be released during the first day of this year’s openSUSE Conference in Prague, Czech Republic on May 25.
Development Objectives
“SLE 15 is developed with both ‘traditional infrastructure’ and ‘software-defined infrastructure’ in mind, thus significant and major changes from the previous SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 are made to address both worlds in a more elegant and simpler way,” explained Frederic Crozat, Release Manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
Five key objectives were selected for SLE 15:
- Provide a common code base for traditional and agile data centers.
- Install all SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 products starting from a single medium.
- Make modules and extensions and easy to use across the SUSE universe.
- Support multiple architectures and deployment
- Be compliant with regulations and built using a secure development model.
New Features
To meet its development objectives, SLE 15 introduces many innovative changes compared with SLE 12.
It will be possible to install all SLE 15 products from the same unified installer media, even without network connection. The installation media will consist of directories with module repositories which need to be added manually as needed, with RMT (Repository Mirroring Tool) and SUSE Manager providing additional options for disconnected or managed installation.
Users who would like to migrate from openSUSE Leap to SLE will be able to do so easily and enjoy the support and stability that comes with an enterprise-grade Linux distribution.
The Software Development Kit has been integrated directly into SLE, and so has been full support for Python 3 development, making SLE 15 the first enterprise distribution that’s ready for the version of the interpreted high-level programming language.
Starting with SLE 15, it will be possible to manage the distribution via Salt to help integration into up-to-date management solutions, such as SUSE Manager. Salt allows for commands to be executed across a swath of remote systems in parallel.
To learn what less is new in SLE 15, we encourage you to read the official release notes, which describe all changes in great detail. SLE 15 is shaping up to be a great release, and we’re excited to see how it will influence the Linux enterprise landscape.
