Replacing OpenSUSE Leap
Replacing openSUSE Leap [LWN.net]


OpenSUSE Leap is a hybrid
distribution; it is based on SUSE's enterprise distribution (SLE), which
follows the "slow and stable" approach, but adds a number of newer packages
on top.  Leap is intended to be a desktop-oriented distribution with a stable
and reliable base.  As SUSE transitions away from its traditional
enterprise distribution toward its "Adaptable
Linux Platform" (ALP), though, the stable base upon which openSUSE Leap
is built is going away.  The openSUSE community is currently discussing how
the project should respond.

ALP is, by design, an amorphous project; it is intended to facilitate the
creation of focused distributions for a number of different use cases.  The
initial targets appear to be server workloads, with a focus on containers
and confidential-computing uses.  While it is somewhat hard to get a grasp
on what future SUSE products will look like, the company does not appear to
be heading toward the creation of another traditional enterprise
distribution as part of the ALP transition.
Rolling slowly

This change poses both a challenge and an opportunity for the openSUSE
project.  The loss of the existing base means that it will not be possible
to continue to create Leap in its current form, but the flexibility of ALP
means that a number of options may open up in the future.  Before pursuing one
or more of those options, though, the community must decide what it wants
to do — and what it has the resources to do.

To that end, a survey of openSUSE users and contributors was recently run;
the results
have been posted, as has an
analysis of those results by Richard Brown.  The latter has sparked the
beginning of what may be a long conversation in the openSUSE community.

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The results are somewhat ambiguous.  On the one hand, there seems to be a
significant portion of the community that would prefer to keep Leap going
in something close to its current form.  On the other, though, there is
also a lot of interest in rolling distributions, which are almost the
opposite of how the core of Leap is managed.  Respondents were asked about
two possible distributions that the community could create to take Leap's
place:

 "Linarite" would be "a regular old fashioned release desktop
     distribution", though with a smaller package selection than is
     provided by Leap now.  It would be based on a SUSE project known as
     "Granite"; there is little public information available regarding this
     project, but it seems to be the ALP-derived product that will be the
     closest to a traditional enterprise server distribution.
 "Slowroll", instead, is a rolling distribution based on the existing
     openSUSE Tumbleweed
     offering (which is not built on enterprise packages and can be
     expected to continue without big changes), but with a stronger focus
     on stability.  Packages would move from Tumbleweed to Slowroll when
     they have shown, over a period of time, that they are unlikely to
     introduce new problems.  Slowroll, Brown said, is "an attempt to
     provide something less scary than full speed Tumbleweed".  

After looking at the survey responses, Brown came to a few conclusions
regarding where, in his opinion, the openSUSE community should focus its
efforts.  By his reading, the respondents "overwhelmingly" support
rolling releases; as a result, he said, any Leap replacement should look
like Slowroll rather than Linarite.  "It is the most popular with our
users, and the option more closely aligned to what our contributors use
themselves."

Beyond that, he said, openSUSE should focus firmly on desktop use cases
rather than trying to build something that might be suitable for server
deployments as well.  Given that openSUSE will be able to package and ship
its own copies of the SUSE products coming out of ALP, and those products
will "be awesome for folk who want Enterprise-like server distros",
Brown does not see much point in openSUSE expending its resources in that
direction.  Instead, since SUSE has little interest in the desktop area at
this point, that is where openSUSE can make a real contribution.

An openSUSE Slowroll can only work, though, if the community can pull
together the resources to build it, and Brown is "concerned that we do
not have enough contributors to make any Leap replacement viable".
Creating and maintaining Slowroll would require more resources than the
current Leap effort, and he is not convinced that those resources will be
available.

Michal Suchánek questioned
the idea that building and maintaining Slowroll would require more work,
given that it would mostly just pull packages from the existing Tumbleweed
distribution.  Brown answered
that it would require a lot of work that is not being done (by the openSUSE
community, at least) now:

	Because, unlike Leap where maintenance for SLE packages is
	effectively 'automatic' (ie. taken care as part of the daily
	business of SLE), and unlike Tumbleweed where it's also effectively
	'automatic' ('just throw a new version at it), Slowroll will likely
	require old-fashioned maintenance (CVE bumps, backports,
	narrow-fixes) for packages in Slowroll but not-yet-ready to be
	copied from Tumbleweed.


If the project is going to do Slowroll at all, he added, it needs to do the
job properly so that it is truly a more secure and stable offering than
Tumbleweed.

Matěj Cepl, instead, suggested
that ALP might be Slowroll, and that openSUSE could have it for
free.  Brown's response
was that, if ALP ends up producing a rolling release at all, it will advance
at a rather slower rate than the community would like.  Slowroll, he said,
is an opportunity to create a rolling release that rolls at a speed chosen
by the openSUSE community.
Taking Leap for Granite

Not everybody in the community has given up on continuing to produce a
distribution that, even if it is not Leap, would have many of the same
characteristics as Leap.  Simon Lees expressed
interest in building such a distribution on top of SUSE's Granite,
whatever that turns out to be.  Brown pointed
out that Granite is not planned for release before 2025; given that
there is currently no plan within openSUSE to create a Leap 15.7
release, basing a successor on Granite would likely leave Leap users without
a supported alternative for at least a year.  Lees, though, is
convinced that a Granite-based Leap replacement is a viable option, and
seems determined to prove it as Granite takes shape:

	Well i'm the sort of person that will take the goal of having a
	distro based on Granite before the end of 15.6 and push my hardest
	to resolve the issues to get there and if come September / October
	2025 that is looking unlikely i'd start to look at temporary
	workarounds to bridge the gap. 


Suchánek asked
why there was no Leap 15.7 release planned; Brown answered
that creating that release would take resources — specifically the SUSE
developers tasked to work on openSUSE — away from helping with a Leap
replacement.  He later added
that: "if I were to persuade SUSE to sponsor the work for a 15.7, that
15.7 will not just be the last Leap release, but we'll almost certainly
have no replacement going forward".  That, he said,
would be the end of a stable, desktop-oriented openSUSE release:

	openSUSE Leap is a very Desktop-centric distribution.

	None of SUSE's planned ALP products have any intention of being a
	Desktop-centric offering.

	If openSUSE doesn't start the work now, then ALP will never be
	ready for the Desktop use cases we currently enjoy with Leap.


In April, Brown had looked at where ALP was headed and concluded
that "if we the community want to build something like old Leap, that
should be totally technically feasible".  Now, though, he seems to be
arguing that openSUSE only has one viable option, Slowroll, going forward.
Lees, instead, appears to still be in favor of doing something more along
the lines of an "old Leap" with an upcoming ALP product as the base.
What the community as a whole feels is the best approach is yet to be
determined.

It is clearly an important decision point for one of the oldest existing
Linux distributions.  Perhaps openSUSE's biggest problem, though, is one
that only appeared at the edges of this conversation: how can the project
attract more contributors so that its options might be less limited in the
future?  According to Brown's initial message, only 61 people contributed
to the last Leap release.  Without people to do the work, the direction
that openSUSE would like to go will only be so relevant.
            