SUSE has announced some big changes to the support term of SUSE Linux Enterprise, with the new release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 6. SLE 15 SP 6 support is being extended to 2037 which means it’s going to have a 19 year support cycle.
“SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 has a commited lifecycle until 2037. With 19 years of support since SUSE Linux Enteprise Server 15 was launch, SUSE is able to provide a safe platform to deploy today your long term applications ensuring that your IT investment is safe in the longest term.”
What’s new in SLE 15 Service Pack 6?
Well, the kernel has been updated to 6.4. They’ve also had some updates for the hardware and driver support for AMD, ARM, NVIDIA, IBM, and Intel. They’ve also been working on faster network performance for this particular release, as well as many enhanced security features.
Why 19 years?
You may be wondering why they would change the support term to be so long. 19 years is by far the longest in any of the Enterprise Linux spaces. Just to be clear, this is pure speculation, but I was thinking about this too and since SUSE Linux Enterprise is planning to change the structure quite a bit with their new approach with the Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP), this is kind of along the lines of an immutable system, although that’s not the exact terminology, but this is really interesting because I think this is a way to hedge some bets. Maybe these changes coming could cause some hesitations from some people to pick SUSE as the system. And if they offer a huge support term, then they could ease the concern for those people and they could be comfortable choosing to go with SLE right now. It’s also worth noting that this support is for SUSE Linux Enterprise, not OpenSUSE. So there you go. That’s my speculation. I have absolutely no idea, no insider knowledge or anything thing because I’m not an insider at all. But I thought that that made sense to me.
If you’d like to learn more about the Adaptable Linux Platform or ALP system coming to SUSE then check out episode 249 of This Week in Linux for the full breakdown details.
What do you think? What do you think of this news? Is 19 years long enough? What do you think of my guess of why? Let me know in the comments or on the forum thread.
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