what is the relation between a release version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Serve (SLES) and the one of OpenSUSE?

Question

what is the relation/dependency between a release version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Serve (SLES) and the one of OpenSUSE? Take Debian/Ubuntu as an analogy, Ubuntu 14.04 takes Debian 7 as its base. Ubuntu 16.04 takes Debian 8 as its base. More details can be found here .

Answer 1

As openSUSE project works side by side with SUSE, and is sponsored by this company, several years ago it was decided to bring development streams closer and synchronize releases. Since then system versions use common kernel versions.

openSUSE version history > Version history :

Starting with version Leap 42.1 (after version 13.2), each major release is expected to be supported for at least 36 months, until the next major version is available (eg 15.0), aligned with SUSE Linux Enterprise Releases. Each minor release (eg 42.1, 42.2, etc.) is expected to be released annually, aligned with SUSE Linux Enterprise Service Packs, and users are expected to upgrade to the latest minor release within 6 months of its availability, leading to a similar support lifecycle of 18 months as earlier.

SUSE Linux versions

OpenSUSE Lifetime

As such the correspondence between the latest versions looks something like this:

Kernel version  SUSE version    openSUSE version
4.4             12.2            42.2
4.4             12.3            42.3
4.12            15.0            15.0
4.12+           15.1            15.1

The latest news:

SUSE proposes synchronizing code streams, includes SLE binaries for openSUSE Leap