1. Apr 2026 | Douglas DeMaio | CC-BY-SA-3.0
The series for openSUSE Leap 15 comes to an end after nearly eight years of providing a consistent community distribution upgradeable to SUSE’s enterprise product. Leap 15.6 will reach end of life (EOL) at the end of this month, marking the end of an era as it will no longer receive maintenance or security updates in the future.
The Leap 15 journey began its journey on May 25, 2018, when 15.0 was released as a fresh community build on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. It brought a huge variety of new software along with an easy migration to SLE, transactional updates, server roles, scalable cloud images, and more.
What followed was an impressively long series of incremental releases from Leap 15.1 to 15.6, as each stable release aligned with its twin, being source and binary compatible, and delivering maintenance and security updates to users over several years.
The series far exceeded promises and ended up spanning nearly eight years of active support. With Leap 15.6 going EOL, users who want to continue receiving maintenance and security updates should upgrade to Jump 16. Jump 16 is expected to go to 16.6 in the fall of 2031 and will have 24 months of support for a point release.
Running an unsupported release means your system will no longer receive patches for vulnerabilities, which over time poses a real security risk. The upgrade path to Leap 16 is the recommended way to stay protected and supported.
You can download openSUSE Leap 16 and the migration tool to upgrade.
Leap 15.6 itself received nearly 24 months of support, extending the traditional 18-month support period by about six months. With Leap 16, users can expect a full 24 months of community support per point release, which is a commitment that reflects the significant effort of maintainers to keep users protected.
Thanks to all the contributors, packagers and users who have made the Leap 15 series such a long-lasting and reliable platform. Here’s to the next chapter with Leap 16!
