[6] Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Frontier, world's first and fastest exascale supercomputer runs on SUSE's SLES 15 (HPE Cray OS).

The initial business model was inspired by recurrent charges established in the mainframe world at this time, and innovated by Jürgen Geck and Malcom Yates.

It was supported by hardware vendors including IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, Dell, SGI, Lenovo, and Fujitsu Siemens Computers.

[10][11][12][13][14] SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES 10) was released in July 2006,[15] and is also supported by the major hardware vendors.

[25] SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 (SLES 12) beta was made available on February 25, 2014,[26] and the final version was released on October 27, 2014.

[2][43] SLES 15 SP2, which updates the kernel, PostgreSQL, Samba, Salt and many other parts of the operating system, was released on July 21, 2020.

SLED includes the GNOME Shell, LibreOffice, Evolution and many other popular open source packages such as Dia, TigerVNC, and lftp.

[46] Sun Microsystems previously licensed SLED as the basis of the Linux version of Java Desktop System.

Micro Focus in turn purchased The Attachmate Group in 2014 and made SUSE an autonomous business unit, before selling it to EQT AB in 2019.

The Xgl+Compiz support enables a variety of advanced graphical effects in the user interface, such as "application tiling" (similar to Exposé).

Other features include making it easier for Linux beginners to connect digital cameras to the computer and play audio files such as MP3s using Helix Banshee.

The version of GNOME included this release was highly customized, and debuted the slab application menu on a one panel layout.

SLED continued to include some proprietary components such as Adobe Flash, as well as open-source implementations of closed sourced plugins and runtimes such as Moonlight and Mono.

SLED 12 introduced several new technological upgrades, including systemd, GNOME 3, GRUB 2, plymouth, and the in-house built wicked wireless network manager.

KDE, the default desktop environment in openSUSE, and support for 32-bit x86 processors were dropped from the enterprise distribution.

SLED 15 included major upgrades to GNOME 3.26, LibreOffice 6.0, GCC 7 and LTS kernel version 4.12.

[58] SLE 15 SP 3 features a unified repository with same source code and binary packages with openSUSE Leap 15.3.

[59] Novell's effort on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 was led by Nat Friedman, one of the two founders of Ximian.

[60] Legacy versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLES 9 and 10) had a ten year product lifecycle.