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⇱ openSUSE Leap 16 To Provide 24 Months Of Maintenance Updates / Community Support - Phoronix

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openSUSE Leap 16 To Provide 24 Months Of Maintenance Updates / Community Support

Written by Michael Larabel in SUSE on 3 September 2025 at 03:47 PM EDT. 10 Comments
SUSE's Lubos Kocman announced today on the behalf of the openSUSE team that they will be providing extended maintenance updates and community support with the upcoming Leap 16 release.

OpenSUSE Leap to date has seen a typical 12 month release cycle plus six months of updates/support to allow for smooth upgrades to the next version. With the upcoming openSUSE Leap 16 release, it will be extended to 24 months. Thus maintenance updates over two point releases for community support.

Kocman wrote on the openSUSE blog:
"We are excited to announce that the record will not stand for long. Leap 16 will take things even further by supporting users with maintenance updates over two releases, giving each release a full 24 months of community support. Unless there is a strategic change the final Leap 16 release will be 16.6 in Fall 2031 and it will keep receiving updates until Leap 17.1 arrives two years later.

Essentially the same applies to our immutable server distribution openSUSE Leap Micro, which is adopting the Leap 16 lifecycle and effectively becomes one of the Leap 16 appliances.

And for those who need even more than 24 months of support, the opensuse migration tool makes it simple to move to SUSE Linux Enterprise or SLE Micro where decades of support are available."

This lifecycle comes with openSUSE Leap continuing to share its binary core with SUSE Linux Enterprise, which SUSE will now be maintaining under general support for 24 months too.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.