[7] The focus of the developers is on creating a stable and user-friendly RPM-based operating system with a large target group for workstations and servers.

[8] Additionally, the project creates a variety of related tools, such as YaST, Open Build Service, openQA, Snapper, Portus, KIWI, and OSEM.

The company's ability to sell an open-source product was largely due to the closed-source development process used.

Since the acquisition by Novell in 2003 and with the advent of openSUSE, this has been reversed: starting with version 9.2, an unsupported one-DVD ISO image of SUSE Professional was made available for download.

In 2006, with version 10.2, the SUSE Linux distribution was officially renamed to openSUSE, as it is pronounced similarly to "open source".

[10][11] Until version 13.2, stable fixed releases with separate maintenance streams from SLE were the project's main offering.

Since late 2015, openSUSE has been split into two main offerings, Leap, the more conservative fixed release Leap distribution based on SLE, and Tumbleweed, the rolling release distribution focused on integrating the latest stable packages from upstream projects.

[16] The openSUSE Project community, sponsored by SUSE and others, develops and maintains various distributions based on Linux.

The community develops openSUSE collaboratively with its corporate sponsors through the Open Build Service, openQA, writing documentation, designing artwork, fostering discussions on open mailing lists and in Internet Relay Chat channels, and improving the openSUSE site through its wiki interface.

The project has several distributions for specific purposes like MicroOS, which is an immutable operating system that hosts container workloads, and the Kubernetes certified distribution Kubic, which is a multi-purpose standalone and Kubernetes container operating system based on openSUSE MicroOS.

The project is sponsored by a number of companies and individuals, most notably SUSE, AMD,[17] B1 Systems, Heinlein Support, and TUXEDO Computers.

[18] The first indication that there should be a community-based Linux distribution called OpenSuSE goes back to a mail of 3 August 2005,[19] in which at the same time the launch of the website opensuse.org was announced.

[citation needed] The project is controlled by its community and relies on the contributions of individuals, working as testers, writers, translators, usability experts, artists, and developers.

[32] Leap is a classic stable distribution approach: one release each year, and in between, security updates and bug fixes.

Linux at the time, the number 42 refers to the question about "life, the universe and everything" in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book series.

After that, the basis packages are received from the SUSE Linux Enterprise, while applications and desktops come from Tumbleweed.

[37] MicroOS[38] is an immutable, minimalistic, self-maintained and transactional system, which is primarily, but not exclusively, intended for use in edge computing or as container runtime.

[42] openSUSE currently (2024) supports installation via ISO and/or over a network from repositories for a wide range of hardware and virtualization platforms.

This includes AArch64 (custom version for Raspberry Pi is available), Arm8, POWER8 (ppc64le), IBM zSystems (s390x), the ubiquitous Intel 64 (x86-64), i586, and i686.

It can also be installed in conventional virtualization environments with a range of architectures e.g. using VirtualBox, VMWare, or Hyper-V. openSUSE Leap currently supports: aarch64, ppc64le, s390x, x86_64.

SUSE includes an installation and administration program called YaST ("Yet another Setup Tool") which handles hard disk partitioning, system setup, RPM package management, online updates, network, and firewall configuration, user administration and more in an integrated interface.

ZYpp is the backend for zypper, the default command line package management tool for openSUSE.

SUSE's contributions in this area have been very wide-ranging, and affecting many parts of KDE such as kdelibs and KDEBase, Kontact, and kdenetwork.

Other notable projects include: KNetworkManager – a front-end to NetworkManager[45] and Kickoff – a new K menu for KDE Plasma Desktop.

The Ximian group became part of Novell, and in turn made and continued several contributions to GNOME with applications such as F-Spot, Evolution and Banshee.

[50] On 11 May 2006, the openSUSE Project released SUSE Linux 10.1, with the mailing list announcement identifying Xgl, NetworkManager, AppArmor and Xen as prominent features.

Several areas that developers focused their efforts on were reworking the menus used to launch programs in KDE and GNOME, moving to ext3 as the default file system, providing support for internal readers of Secure Digital cards commonly used in digital cameras, improving power management framework (more computers can enter suspended states instead of shutting down and starting up) and the package management system.

[67] openSUSE 13.2 was released on 4 November 2014, and includes updates to Plasma 4.11, KDE Applications 4.14, GNOME 3.14.1, Firefox 33.0 and LibreOffice 4.3.2.2.

The openSUSE team decided that the next version would be based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).

[78] Evergreen[57] was a community effort to prolong maintenance of selected openSUSE versions after they reached official end-of-life before the Leap series.