A statement from the release team said the new version would run on the x86-64, ARM64 and POWER systems. "Leap 15.2 represents a huge step forward in the artificial intelligence space," said Marco Varlese, a developer and member of the project.

"I am super excited that openSUSE end-users can now finally consume machine learning / deep learning frameworks and applications via our repositories to enjoy a stable and up-to-date ecosystem."

Some of the AI and ML packages are Tensorflow which is a framework for deep learning that can be used by data scientists to provide numerical computations and data-flow graphs; PyTorch, which is for both server and compute resources to accelerate power users’ ability to prototype a project and move it to a production deployment; ONNX, an open format built to represent machine learning models and provide interoperability in the AI tool space; and Grafana and Prometheus both of which open up new possibilities for analytical experts.

"Think edge computing, embedded devices, data capturing, all of which are seeing immense growth.

"Historically many of these have been the domain of proprietary approaches; openSUSE now opens the floodgates for developers, researchers and companies that are interested in testing real time capabilities or maybe even in contributing. Another domain open source helps open up!"

For the first time, Kubernetes is an official package in the openSUSE release, giving a huge boost to container orchestration capabilities and allowing users to automate deployments, scale, and manage containerised applications. Helm, the package manager for Kubernetes, is also added.

Container Runtime Interface using Open Container Initiative conformant runtimes is also new to this release. CRI-O is a lightweight alternative to using Docker as the runtime, which allows Kubernetes to use any OCI-compliant runtime as the container runtime for running pods or processes running on a cluster.

Even with Docker, the use of microservices will be secure thanks to more container packages arriving in this release.

Leap 15.2 offers both Server and Transactional Server system roles; the former uses a small set of packages suitable for servers with a text mode interface while the latter is similar to the Server role, but uses a read-only root filesystem to provide atomic, automatic updates of the system without interfering with the running system.

File sharing and cloud services include software such as NextCloud and even the groupware application suite Kopano is part of the official Leap 15.2 repositories.

Minor versions of the Leap 15 series have about an 18-month life cycle; minor releases come roughly once a year. Users of openSUSE Leap 15.1, which was released in May 2019, should upgrade to Leap 15.2 within the next six months. The first release of Leap 15 came out two years ago.