The openSUSE project is undergoing changes that, to us at least, indicate a multiplicity of future directions for the code base.
Several openSUSE projects have been updated in fact as the Linux distribution’s maker and its user and contributor community figures out where it might head in a more container-oriented future.
One of these developments is the new open source Slowroll distribution. Like the existing openSUSE Tumbleweed, Slowroll is a rolling-release distro, albeit with a much slower release cycle, which is intended to make it more appealing to users who currently run Leap, openSUSE’s stable-release distribution.
Slowroll updates over time
Slowroll is an experimental distro, and that means that it may not stick around. One thing it definitely will not do is replace openSUSE Tumbleweed. That is still in active development and will continue to be; indeed, the most recent news release for Tumbleweed includes significant changes, notably support for systemd-boot, as used in the popular third-party Ubuntu remix Pop!_OS – in which it caused The Reg FOSS desk significant problems a couple of years ago.
For clarity, although systemd-boot is now part of the systemd project, it’s not directly part of the systemd init system as such. Before it was assimilated and renamed, it was an independent project called gummiboot, which is German for rubber dinghy. It is an alternative to the GRUB bootloader, and it keeps your distro’s kernel and initrd (initial RAMdisk) directly inside your EFI system partition, rather than in the root filesystem as usual.
The openSUSE team has also just announced a beta version 5.5 of Leap Micro, and when that is released, Le
