The openSUSE.Asia Summit Organizing Committee has extended the deadline for the Call for Host to submit proposals for the 2027 Summit. Communities now have until 30 November, 2026 to apply.

The extension comes in response to requests from local communities seeking more time to prepare their proposals. This is a great opportunity to showcase your region and bring the openSUSE community together in your city.

If your community is interested in hosting the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2027, come and join us at openSUSE.Asia Summit 2026 in Yogyakarta this October. The organizing committee can provide presentation slots for communities interested in hosting the 2027 Summit, giving them an opportunity to introduce their community, city, and vision for the next Summit.

For more information, visit https://news.opensuse.org/2026/07/14/osas-cfh/.

Entering RC Phase

openSUSE Leap 16.1 has entered the Release Candidate phase. Release Candidate images can be found at get.opensuse.org.

We know that people really start testing a new release with the RC, so this is the right time to grab an image and give it a try.

Users can expect that we’ll continue publishing roughly one build a week during the RC phase. Once SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16.1 announces their Gold Master, we’ll be working toward the Leap 16.1 Gold Master Candidate (GMC).

Based on feedback from the Leap 16.0 retrospective, we’ll sync the Leap 16.1 release day with the SLES 16.1 release day, even if that means a slight delay. This way, there is no obvious gap in receiving maintenance updates after the release.

Details about the schedule can be found in our roadmap.

Usecase: Try the new Immutable mode

Leap 16.1 is the first Leap release to offer an Immutable Mode, a transactionally updated system with a read-only root filesystem. This is essentially what our users know from Leap Micro, just integrated directly into Leap.

Leap 16.1 in Immutable mode is replacing Leap Micro. There won’t be a Leap Micro 6.3 or 7.0; Leap Immutable is the way forward for container and virtual machine hosts, edge devices and anyone who prefers atomic updates with easy rollback.

The Immutable mode was added to Agama rather recently, which is exactly why we’d like you to try it. Simply boot the usual Leap 16.1 install image and pick the Immutable mode in the installer.

Doesn’t agama with dark theme look amazing? Once installed, the system is updated with transactional-update, which creates a new snapshot for every update and lets you roll back if something goes wrong.

sudo transactional-update dup    # update the system into a new snapshot
sudo reboot                      # boot into the new snapshot
sudo transactional-update rollback  # go back if something went wrong

Additional software is best consumed via containers with podman or distrobox, or via Flatpak on desktops. Packages can still be installed with sudo transactional-update pkg install <package>.

Leap Micro users: appliances are still here

Users who are used to the Leap Micro images will feel at home. The usual preconfigured appliances can be found in the alternative downloads section at get.opensuse.org. This includes the Immutable Self-install image, which is recommended for USB installations, as well as images for KVM/Xen, MS Hyper-V, VMware, Harvester and Cloud, and a fully encrypted raw disk image.

The appliances can be configured on first boot via Ignition or Combustion, just like Leap Micro.

Existing Leap Micro 6.2 installations can be migrated to Leap 16.1 in Immutable mode with the opensuse-migration-tool.

sudo transactional-update shell
# Inside the shell:
zypper in opensuse-migration-tool
opensuse-migration-tool --dry-run # optionally check how it looks
opensuse-migration-tool
exit && reboot # boot into the new snapshot

The tool is still experimental, so please make sure to have a backup and let us know how the migration went.

Desktops: Same GNOME, newer Plasma

Some users may expect a big GNOME update in Leap 16.1. In fact, Leap 16.1 ships the same GNOME 48 as Leap 16.0, with bug fix updates (gnome-shell 48.8 vs. 48.4 in 16.0).

Just like in Leap 15.X and the respective SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 service packs, the big GNOME update is planned over two releases.

Leap 16.0 and 16.1 share the same GNOME major version, and users can expect the next big GNOME update in a future release.

KDE Plasma users, on the other hand, get a noticeable bump from Plasma 6.4 to Plasma 6.6 with Qt 6.11 and KDE Frameworks 6.25.

LXQt moved from 2.2 to 2.4, and Xfce on Wayland continues with 4.20.

What’s new in Leap 16.1

Wondering which version of your favorite package you’ll get in Leap 16.1? Rather than listing a handful of packages here, we’d like to point you to our new openSUSE version diff tool.

It’s a single page comparing source package versions across Leap 16.1, Leap 16.0 and Tumbleweed, including the latest upstream versions from Repology.

The page republishes itself automatically, so it stays up to date during the whole RC phase and beyond. You can filter packages by status, e.g. to see what was updated compared to 16.0, or download the data as JSON or CSV.

The tool grew out of a community discussion at our weekly Release Engineering meeting; read more about it in One Page, Every Package.

Ideas and contributions are welcome at github.com/openSUSE/osdiff.

Help us with testing

Your feedback is critical at this stage. Help us with testing by following our manual test plan.

The plan covers scenarios that are hard to automate in openQA, so every test case marked as done on as many hardware combinations as possible helps us to ship a better release.

Simply record your result with your openSUSE ID; we intend to award Kudos badges to everyone participating in manual testing.

Alternatively, simply install Leap 16.1 RC, try the Immutable mode, your favorite desktop or your usual server workload, and let us know how it goes.

Please report any issues on bugzilla.opensuse.org.

Please make sure to check the Known bugs wiki page prior to reporting a new bug.

Thank you for testing and being part of the openSUSE community. Let’s shape Leap 16.1 together!

The openQA test suite for openSUSE and SLE has about 2,400 test modules and 1,500 schedule files. Over a 12-month window they run a few million times and burn about 710,000 machine-hours of worker time across two instances, the public openqa.opensuse.org and SUSE’s internal openQA. For the last two months I have been trying to shrink that number, cheap wins first.

I kept finding fossils. A comment header in hostname describing code deleted in 2019. A network restart timeout that crept from 10 to 120 seconds over two years of bug reports. A make -B workaround from 2018 for a bug fixed upstream that same year. Each made sense when it was written. But they add up, and they run on every job.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week was another busy and productive cycle, seeing the publication of 6 snapshots (0917, 0918, 0919, 0921, 0922, and 0923) to keep your rolling distributions completely fresh.

Leading the charge on the desktop side, web browsing received a welcome boost with the arrival of Mozilla Firefox 156.0, while GNOME users were treated to nice polish with point updates to GNOME Shell 50.5, Mutter 50.5, and Libadwaita 1.9.4. Under the hood, Linux Kernel 7.2.6, Mesa 26.2.3, and PipeWire 1.6.9 kept the core hardware, graphics, and multimedia foundations moving along smoothly.

Alongside the big-name releases, package maintainers have kept the updates flowing steadily to keep the distribution secure and robust, with welcome updates arriving for AppStream 1.2.0, PackageKit 1.4.0, util-linux, and Python 3.13.

These 6 snapshots delivered the following updates:

• AppStream 1.2.0
• bluez 5.87
• cppcheck 2.22.0
• cryptsetup 2.8.8
• feh 3.13.1
• freerdp 3.31.1
• glslang 16.6.0
• gnome-shell 50.5
• gzip 1.15
• harfbuzz 14.5.0
• hplip 3.26.6
• ImageMagick 7.1.2.31
• jemalloc 5.4.0
• kdump 2.1.10
• libadwaita 1.9.4
• libgsf 1.14.59
• libheif 1.23.5
• libinput 1.32
• libsolv 0.7.40
• libsrtp2 2.8.1
• libstorage-ng 4.5.354
• libupnp 22.1.2
• libzio 1.17
• libzypp 17.38.16
• lightdm 1.33.1
• lightdm-gtk-greeter 2.0.9
• Linux Kernel 7.2.6
• Mesa 26.2.3
• mozilla-nss 3.128
• MozillaFirefox 156.0
• mutter 50.5
• ncurses 6.6.20260919
• nvme-cli 3.1
• p11-kit 0.26.5
• PackageKit 1.4.0
• perl-Cpanel-JSON-XS 4.520.0
• perl-GD 2.910.0
• pipewire 1.6.9
• pulseaudio-qt6 1.9.0
• Python 3.13.15
• python-greenlet 3.5.6
• python-tornado6 6.5.10
• rsync 3.5.1
• shaderc 2026.4
• snappy 1.3.0
• suitesparse 7.14.1
• thin-provisioning-tools 1.3.4
• util-linux 2.42.3
• VirtualBox 7.2.18
• xscreensaver 6.16
• xwaylandvideobridge 0.5.3
• xxhash 0.8.4

Looking beyond these releases, here is what is currently working its way through staging:

• Linux Kernel: Both 7.2.7 and 7.2.8 updates are on their way, with 7.2.7 already lined up and 7.2.8 progressing through staging.
• KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta: Currently being tested, working through build and installcheck hurdles.
• expat: Blocked by build failures in perl-XML-Twig.
• systemd: Currently blocked on a security review of its D-Bus services.
• Swig 4.5.0: YaST integration issues remain under investigation, with yast2-network, yast2-nfs-client, and yast2-storage-ng currently failing builds.
• fontconfig 2.18.3: Still held up as it breaks the AppStream test suite.
• libnettle 4.0.0: Remains explicitly excluded from main staging runs while developers work on resolving test suite breakages in libzypp.

This is a roundup of articles from the openSUSE community listed on planet.opensuse.org. This community blog feed aggregator lists the featured highlights below from Sept. 18 - 24.

This week highlights Xiaomi’s MiMo V2.6 AI family, a brightness-flickering fix for VRR on Plasma, two guides to building Flatpaks locally with Foundry, the history of Madrid’s MAX classroom distribution, AkademyES 2026’s 30/20 anniversary gathering and KDE’s Marknote notebook, a sleep-mode fix for openSUSE Leap, the Flip Clock plasmoid, a weeklybeats track and more.

Here is a summary and links for each post:

Leap Heads Into Release Candidate Phase

The openSUSE News blog covers openSUSE Leap 16.1 nearing its Release Candidate stage. The release brings major package updates, including KDE Plasma 6.6.4, QEMU 11, MariaDB 12, and PHP 8.5, and the team is asking testers to help find any remaining issues.

Plasma 6.8 Beta 2 released

The KDE Blog covers the releases of the second beta of Plasma 6.8. It points out the improved GTK4 window decorations, a redesigned Flatpak permissions page, and Discover enhancements. This release also continues the public technical preview of the Union theming system.

Xiaomi MiMo V2.6: Xiaomi Fully Enters the Race for Open AI Models

Alessandro’s blog introduces Xiaomi’s MiMo V2.6 family, headlined by the trillion-parameter MoE-based MiMo-V2.6-Pro with a 1-million-token window and native text, image, video and audio support. The post details the 42-billion-active-parameter architecture, large-scale reinforcement learning and aggressive API pricing, and notes MIT-licensed weights and RL infrastructure released for the community.

KDE Express Episode 76: Brightness Flickering with VRR Adaptive Sync

The KDE Blog presents episode 76 of KDE Express, where David Marzal shares a personal fix for brightness flickering with VRR, HDR and adaptive brightness on Plasma. The episode traces the issue to bug 477016 on an AMD RX 580 over DisplayPort and asks listeners with VRR monitors for feedback.

Building Flatpaks Locally, Part 2

Jakub Steiner follows up his flatpak-builder guide with a simpler path on GNOME OS using the developer sysext. With foundry init && foundry build he shows how projects can be built locally without the manual builder setup.

Windows or Linux? The Digital Sovereignty Dilemma in Madrid’s Classrooms – Episode 6 of the Podcast “The Era of the Distros”

The KDE Blog highlights episode 6 of “La era de las distros,” which explores Madrid’s MAX distribution for schools and Spain’s early-2000s free-software classroom push. Host Lorenzo Carbonell is joined by Jose Quirino Vargas Ibáñez, Ismail Ali and Jesús González-Barahona to discuss digital sovereignty beyond license costs.

Tiny Wins for Packagers: End-of-Week Update (2026-09-18)

The Open Build Service blog welcomes new contributor wineee and notes a fix to avoid crashing on build logs for scmsync-related packages. The short update is part of the service’s regular end-of-week roundup for packagers.

AkademyES 2026: The Most Social Gathering of #KDE Spain and Free Software Supporters

Victorhck announces AkademyES 2026, set for October 23-25 at Camping Arco Iris in the Madrid mountains to mark KDE’s 30th and KDE España’s 20th anniversaries. The post outlines lodging, mandatory registration and a call for talks for the community-focused camping event.

KDE’s Markdown Notebook, Marknote

The KDE Blog introduces Marknote, KDE’s Markdown notebook for organizing notes in local .md files under Documents. It covers notebooks with icons and accent colors, rich-text and source editing, wiki-style links, a KRunner plugin and import from KNotes and maildir.

Sleep Mode in openSUSE

Alexander Tolstoy details an intermittent resume-from-suspend hang on openSUSE Leap on an Intel 9th-gen system without NVIDIA, which never appeared on Fedora. After ruling out the kernel, he resolved it by disabling and masking power-profiles-daemon and enabling tuned instead.

The Classic HTC Clock on Your Desktop, Flip Clock – Plasmoids for Plasma 6 (40)

The KDE Blog presents Flip Clock, the 40th entry in its Plasma 6 plasmoids series, which brings the HTC Sense flip-card clock to the desktop. The widget shows hours and minutes on animated flaps with optional date, weather, 12/24-hour and animation settings, requiring Plasma 6.7 or newer.

Stolen!

Jakub Steiner shares his weeklybeats track “Stolen!”, sampling the AI-industry debate with extra polish time on the Dirtywave M8. He describes mimicking an Analog Four filter and volume pulse technique using the M8’s four LFOs and modulator routing.

Bonsai 2 27B: A New Metric for Artificial Intelligence

Alessandro’s blog introduces PrismML’s Bonsai 2 27B, a ternary-compressed build of Qwen3.8-27B that shrinks a 54 GB FP16 model to about 5.9 GB while retaining 98.2% performance. The post explains Hadamard rotation, GGUF and MLX variants, up to 262K context and the need for a custom llama.cpp fork.

Linux Saloon 220 | Early Edition

Nathan Wolf posts the Early Edition of Linux Saloon 220, reflecting on a theater outing to the 1986 Transformers movie, browser use in 2026 and mobile trends. The episode also notes retro hardware, GOG’s big-box revival and an upcoming open mic night.

Let the Polishing Begin – This Week in Plasma

The KDE Blog translates Nate Graham’s “This Week in Plasma” report, which focuses on polishing Plasma 6.8 ahead of release. With only four open regressions, it lists UI tweaks for Wi-Fi and KWin Overview, Kup backup timing improvements and fixes across Plasma 6.6.7 through 6.9.

Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2026/38

Dominique Leuenberger and Victorhck review six Tumbleweed snapshots (0910, 0911, 0912, 0914, 0915 and 0916), headlined by Plasma 6.7.5, Frameworks 6.30 and Gear 26.08.1 followed by security updates for glibc, cups and xz. The roundup also notes Mesa’s Rockchip and Teflon additions, OpenCV’s JPEG XL/AVIF support and kernel 7.2.5.

Krita 5.3.4 and Krita 6.0.4 Released

The KDE Blog notes the simultaneous releases of Krita 5.3.4 and 6.0.4, bringing bug fixes across the digital painting suite and video export on Android. The update also drops the unmaintained GIMP XCF import plugin for security reasons.

Building Flatpaks Locally

Jakub Steiner explains building Flatpaks locally with flatpak-builder distributed as a Flathub Flatpak_org.flatpak.Builder. He walks through installing the builder and building the GNOME icon tool Shaper with flatpak-builder --user --install.

View more blogs or learn to publish your own on planet.opensuse.org.

The openSUSE Release Team says openSUSE Leap 16.1 is close to its Release Candidate (RC) stage, with general availability planned for November.

Leap Release Manager Luboš Kocman told the openSUSE project mailing list that the next build was expected to qualify as the RC. He said it should reach openQA, which is openSUSE’s automated testing system soon.

Kocman said recent changes merged into SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 16.1 had caused an additional delay.

The RC build is expect to arrive this week.

Testers can help by grabbing the latest image from get.opensuse.org/testing, picking a test from the Leap 16.1 manual test plan (high-priority and untried tests help most), and recording their result with their openSUSE username and build number; participants will receive an openSUSE Kudos badge as a thank-you.

The official roadmap had the RC build set for Sept. 16. The build is now running about a week behind that date.

The team plans to produce about one build per week during the RC phase to find and fix any remaining release blockers.

The release team says testing matters most at this stage. Users and contributors can help by:

• Running their usual workflows on the RC builds and reporting critical issues to openSUSE Bugzilla.
• Checking the non-blocking bug list for items assigned to them.

Saved bug queries and known issues are on the openSUSE Known Bugs 16.1 wiki page, and the full schedule is on the openSUSE Roadmap.

Leap 16.1 and SLES 16.1 will launch on the same day because of feedback from the Leap 16.0 release retrospective. Shipping together means Leap users won’t face a gap between the release and the first maintenance updates. Those updates arrive with the SLES 16.1 GA and flow directly to Leap.

What’s New: Notable Package Updates

Leap 16.1 brings a range of desktop, developer, and server updates compared with Leap 16.0:

KDE users get the biggest jump: two Plasma feature releases and nine Frameworks releases, built on a newer Qt 6.11. On the server and virtualization side, QEMU moves to a new major version, MariaDB jumps to the 12 series, and PHP moves to 8.5.

There are currently no known release blockers.

The original announcement and follow-up are in the openSUSE project mailing list thread.

Some of you mentioned the flatpak-builder approach is way too complicated. Indeed it is.

All you need to do with the developer sysext on GNOME OS is to:

foundry init && foundry build

Been building projects left and right today and it's rad.

Bombarded by the deception and lies of the AI industry I chose to sample boy Amodei for the ironic outrage about Chinese companies stealing their dataset. Thus the tune title.

Usually I barely manage to finish up my weekly beats track on a Sunday night. This week I've somehow had some extra time to sink into polishing an actual full track on the Dirtywave M8. Built around the bassline where I've mimicked the approach used on the Analog 4 of fading in a modulated filter and volume pulse over time using slight different tools (the M8 has 4 LFOs and ability to modulate a modulator).